Sen. Carl Levin may be a Democrat, but as the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he also knows which side of his bread contains the butter — and who is paying for it, too. Like Leon Panetta, he is trying to stir up fear over even the tiny cuts in defense spending in the sequestration deal:
Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) warned on Sunday that those employed in the defense industry should be worried about the possibility of sequestration.
“You should be worried if you have a defense job,” the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”…
“The key here is whether or not the Republicans will move away from the ideologically rigid position, which has been the Grover Norquist pledge, which most of them signed, that they will not go for additional revenues,” Levin said.
Yes, he’s using that to argue against a bad idea (the refusal to raise more federal revenue, which is the principal cause of the deficit), but he still has it wrong. Even if some taxes are raised, that money should not be used to keep the country’s already astonishingly profligate “defense” spending the same. The defense budget should be cut — a lot, not a little. We account for nearly 50% of all the military spending on the entire planet, for crying out loud.
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