A significant defeat for the Zionist lobby?
“Americans don’t particularly like government, but they do want government to subsidize their health care. They believe that health care spending improves their lives more than any other public good. In a Quinnipiac poll, typical of many others, Americans opposed any cuts to Medicare by a margin of 70 percent to 25 percent.”
Brooks then noted that the line tracing federal health care spending “looks like the slope of a jet taking off from LaGuardia,” and that Medicare spending “is set to nearly double over the next decade.” This, he added, is the crucial element driving all federal spending over the next few decades and pushing federal debt to about 250 percent of G.D.P. in 30 years. “There are no conceivable tax increases that can keep up with this spending rise.”
In my view what Brooks went on to say contains the key to real understanding of not only why Obama wanted Hagel, but also what we can and cannot expect from a second-term Obama presidency on policy for Israel-Palestine.
So far, Brooks noted, defense budgets have not been squeezed by the ever rising demand for expenditure on Medicare. (The military budget has more than doubled since 9/11). “But that is about to change.”
To set up his main argument Brooks drew off one advanced by Oswald Spengler, the German historian and philosopher (1880 – 1936) who wrote The Decline of the West. Spengler, Brooks said, “was certainly correct when he told European leaders that they could either be global military powers or pay for their welfare states, but they couldn’t do both.”
Brooks continued:
“Europeans, who are ahead of us in confronting that decision, have chosen welfare over global power. European nations can no longer perform many elemental tasks of moving troops and fighting. As late as the 1990s, Europeans were still spending 2.5 percent of G.D.P. on defense. Now that spending is closer to 1.5 percent, and, amid European malaise, it is bound to sink further.
“The United States will undergo a similar process. The current budget calls for a steep but possibly appropriate decline in defense spending, from 4.3 percent of G.D.P. to 3 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
“As the federal government becomes a health care state, there will have to be a generation of defense cuts that overwhelm anything in recent history. Keep in mind how brutal the budget pressure is going to be. According to the Government Accountability Office, if we act on entitlements today, we will still have to cut federal spending by 32 percent and raise taxes by 46 percent over the next 75 years to meet current obligations. If we postpone action for another decade, then we have to cut all non-interest federal spending by 37 percent and raise all taxes by 54 percent.
“As this sort of crunch gradually tightens, Medicare will be the last to go. Spending on things like Head Start, scientific research and defense will go quicker. These spending cuts will transform America’s stature in the world, making us look a lot more like Europe today.
“Chuck Hagel has been nominated to supervise the beginning of this generation-long process of defense cutbacks. If a Democratic president is going to slash defense, he probably wants a Republican at the Pentagon to give him political cover, and he probably wants a decorated war hero to boot.”
For absolute clarity, “to boot” in the sentence above means “as well” or “also”. It does not mean that Hagel was selected for the prime purpose of assisting Obama to put the boot into the Zionist lobby!
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