Wednesday, August 06, 2008

What ME Worry?: I enjoyed Jeff Jacoby's editorial "What them worry?" in the August 6 Globe. I cannot argue with any of it. It was well written, as usual . There is truth to this one. Conservatives, though, start worrying me when they begin to wax on and on about the horrendous deficit and what they perceive are its causes. The similarities between I as a progressive and Jeff Jacoby as a conservative are that we both agree the Bush deficits are absolutely humongous and will be a horrific burden for future generations to undo. The difference between the two of us, though, is what government expenditures we would love to trim. When conservatives decry all the "entitlement programs" they are speaking about the various humanitarian programs government since the New Deal has employed. I then start to get nervous as those so called entitlements save my and the whole country's life. When conservatives want to cut entitlements they mean they want to cut programs for the poor, the sick, the elderly, the handicapped, the retired or the dispossessed. When I talk about balancing the budget I mean cutting huge wasted expenditures on a military and now a war industrial complex gone haywire. The operative word here, I believe, is humanitarian. I know, of course, a military is necessary so please do not think I am stupidly naive and want to cut out military spending to the degree it would put our country at great risk. Even Dwight Eisenhower, president and five star general, though, talked about the dangers of a bloated military and I believe Dwight Eisenhower was no liberal. If the cuts come anywhere, I believe, they should start trimming our military budget and revisiting nature of our foreign policy which gets us into purposeless no-end-in-sight wars which cost a fortune. That is the real culprit which puts this nation at great risk.

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