To pay for health care, there will have to be defense cuts that
overwhelm anything in recent history.
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.
In a democracy, voters get what they want, so the line tracing
federal health care spending looks like the slope of a jet taking
off from LaGuardia. Medicare spending is set to nearly double over
the next decade. This 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. The Democrats had their best chance in a generation
to raise revenue just now, and all they got was a measly $600
billion over 10 years. This is barely a wiggle on the revenue line
and does nothing to change the overall fiscal picture.
As a result, health care spending, which people really
appreciate, is squeezing out all other spending, which they value
far less. Spending on domestic programs -- for education, science,
infrastructure and poverty relief -- has already faced the squeeze
and will take a huge hit in the years ahead. President Obama
excoriated Paul Ryan for offering a budget that would cut spending
on domestic programs from its historical norm of 3 or 4 percent of
G.D.P. all the way back to 1.8 percent. But the Obama budget is the
Ryan budget. According to the Office of Management and Budget, Obama
will cut domestic discretionary spending back to 1.8 percent of
G.D.P. in six years.
Advocates for children, education and the poor don't even try to
defend their programs by lobbying for cutbacks in Medicare. They
know that given the choice, voters and politicians care more about
middle-class seniors than about poor children.
So far, defense budgets have not been squeezed by the Medicare
vice. But that is about to change. Oswald Spengler didn't get much
right, but he 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.
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.
But defense planners are notoriously bad at estimating how fast
postwar military cuts actually come. After Vietnam, the Cold War and
the 1991 Gulf War, they vastly underestimated the size of the cuts
that eventually materialized. And those cuts weren't forced by the
Medicare vice. The coming cuts are.
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. This is why Adm. Mike Mullen called the national debt
the country's biggest security threat.
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.
All the charges about Hagel's views on Israel or Iran are
secondary. The real question is, how will he begin this long cutting
process? How will he balance modernizing the military and paying
current personnel? How will he recalibrate American defense strategy
with, say, 455,000 fewer service members?
How, in short, will Hagel supervise the beginning of America's
military decline? If members of Congress don't want America to
decline militarily, well, they have no one to blame but the voters
and themselves.
