Alan Grayson - How To Cut $2 Trillion From The U.S. Budget In Ten Years (Something Obama And Republicans Won’t Tell You)

I like Alan Grayson as someone who speaks reasoned dissent to the corporate state.  Republican lackeys for the corporate state hate Grayson and targeted him in the last election.  Corporate state lackeys chafe against regulatory reform, cutting corporate welfare and social programs which add dignity to to the lives of people  who are often victims of the corporate state.  

Grayson and Pat Buchanan agree on the illegitimacy of the corporate state.  Yet ideologues wish to paint these two and many others as people who should never agree on anything.  But ideologues wish to perpetuate divisiveness for their own personal gain rather than search for truth.  The search for truth would find that today’s issues aren’t left versus right as ideologues would wish to frame the debate,  but rather right versus wrong.   Grayson and Buchanan agree.

Buchanan’s remarks are also truthful.  Let’s take Buchanan’s remarks a step further to a point we have made on here.  Not only is the U.S. borrowing from Japan to defend Japan, the U.S. is borrowing from China and Russia to encircle China and Russia with America’s military and political hegemony.    These countries aren’t chafing at lending dollars to the U.S. because the dollar is worthless.  (By the way, they are lending our dollars back to us in one of the greatest acts of insanity of our time.)  That is utter nonsense perpetuated by ideologues we call dollar bears.  China and Russia are chafing against lending  dollars to the U.S. because this dynamic is funding the U.S. political and war machine’s encirclement of their own countries.   This dynamic is clearly unsustainable - enemies of the United States are not going to continue to fund our hegemony over their own wishes.

Grayson & Buchanan’s comments on the debt binge of the U.S. corporate state and what President Obama and the Republican leadership won’t tell you.  Instead they would rather take money from Grandma, from disabled veterans and from special needs children to protect the corporate state:

PEACE.

Now, I know that peace may not be as popular as it used to be.  The polling is very iffy.  The focus groups are mixed.  But let’s look at the facts.

Last year, we spent $154 billion in appropriated funds on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  That is in addition to the $549 billion in appropriated funds for the Pentagon – you know, just to keep the lights on.  And the non-appropriated cost of war was even higher – especially when you include the cost of care for the 15% of all the American troops in Iraq who come home with permanent brain abnormalities.  According to Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, the war in Iraq alone is costing us $4 trillion and counting. That’s more than $13,000 for every one of us, and roughly 8% of our entire net worth as a nation.

The cost of war is enormous.  So enormous that, as I pointed out in H.R. 5353, The War is Making You Poor Act, if we simply funded that cost through the Pentagon’s own budget, rather than through supplemental appropriations, we could eliminate taxes on everyone’s first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for married couples), and still reduce the deficit by more than $10 billion a year.

And that was last year.  Since then, the number of wars has gone up by 50%.

This is what Pat Buchanan – of all people, Pat Buchanan – said two weeks ago:

"The United States is strategically over-extended, worldwide. What are we doing borrowing money from Japan to defend Japan. Borrow money from Europe to defend Europe. Borrow money from the Persian Gulf to defend the Persian Gulf. This country is over-extended. It is an empire and the empire is coming down."

You say that you want to save $2 trillion in ten years?  It’s simple:  end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and end whatever it is that they are calling it now in Libya.  I’d rather do that than throw Granny from the train.

But that’s just me.

Guns or butter.  It’s not a new choice.

I prefer butter.

What about you?

Courage,

Alan Grayson

P.S.  Please sign our petition at www.No-Cuts.com.  And pass it on to every friend you have.  It’s important -- let’s be heard.