[Peace-discuss] Barney Frank Schools NPR on S&P, Social Security, and Cuts to Military Spending

[Robert Naiman]

Barney Frank smacks down National Pentagon Radio:

- S&P has a long track record of error, over-rating private debt and
undervaluing public debt

- if you make more than $250,000 a year in taxable income, for the
government to get another $30 from every additional thousand will have
no negative impact on you are the economy and will help us reduce the
deficit without savage cuts to the environment and highways

- we can no longer be the world's military budget or policeman

- withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan at a cost of $125 billion a year

- the President is unfortunately talking about keeping US troops in
Iraq, at a cost of billions of dollars a year, which would keep US
troops there longer than George Bush

- there is no firm withdrawal date in Afghanistan, they're talking
about staying there several more years

- time to tell NATO they no longer need American protection,
everything has changed in the world except the tens of billions of
American money that go there

- many Republicans now are starting to move in this direction.
Obviously I and the Tea Party disagree on a number of issues, but a
significant number of them are willing to break with the establishment
view that it is somehow America's responsibility to guard the whole
world. There is no justification for America protecting Western Europe
against nonexistent threats. There is no justification for us building
anti-missile defense systems in Poland the Czech Republic to protect
them against nonexistent threats from Iran

- the Defense budget is bigger than Medicare

- Social Security is self-financing

- I am not going to tell an 80 year woman living on $19,000 a year
that she gets no cost of living, or that a man who has been doing
physical labor all his life, and is now at a 67 year old retirement,
which is where Social Security will be soon, that he has to work for
five more years.

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=139234858&m=139234857




--
Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org