What overstretch really means

I read Obama's address last night, I didn't listen to it. I don't plan on writing too much about it, because other commentators have done a better job of assessing its technical issues than I could. I'm not even going to get into the horse-race or narrative debate. That said, I'd like to take issue with a few key lines from the speech, not in the context of health care, but of the implications of our domestic expenditures on our national power.

Obama boldly declared, "I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last." Well, I would hope he has a lot more in the way of reform that this bill has outlined. Because while his plan may cover more uninsured, it does nothing to address the very real threat that Medicare cost increases pose to the budget. Are we really supposed to believe that Obama will keep his promises (or more realistically, that Obama's successors will keep Obama's promise) to cut programs to keep the health care plan deficit neutral? The plan, by CBO estimates, is likely to inflate costs and push out the cost curve, not reduce it. That's not even getting into the problem of Medicare spending growth.

Now, Obama retorts (and Steve Walt agrees) that his new health care plan costs less than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, we shouldn't worry about entitlement spending, because we fight wars, and as Dwight Eisenhower said, our wars steal from public programs at home. This is true. But it's disingenuous to think that we could pay for our public programs if only we weren't fighting so many wars. Political Math breaks it down, and the implication is clear: defense is not the monster gobbling up our budget the way it was in the '40s and '50s, when Eisenhower spoke of the military industrial complex. The reality is that all wars end. Even Afghanistan will end. Mandatory spending, which health care will contribute to, not reduce, does not end. It won't be enough to cut the new health care spending, existing government spending in the form of Medicare is a major long term problem. On top of that, TARP and the stimulus package have created additional budgetary complications.

American overstretch is not simply about fighting too many wars, or even the costs exacted on the military. The US military survived Vietnam, it will survive Iraq and Afghanistan. The cost in human life is tragic, but it is not insurmountable. The appropriation of these wars for domestic policy rhetoric, though, is largely erroneous. Military spending is not the main threat to domestic spending, our debt is. Military spending is not driving our debt, domestic entitlements are. But this crushing debt is also a threat to our military capabilities, and more broadly, the strategic position of the US. Our eroding economic foundations both inhibit the US in absolute terms by harming our long-term economic outlook and in relative terms by constraining our ability to leverage our economic might. While we might argue that our economic situation makes wars like Iraq and Afghanistan prohibitively expensive, it is our domestic irresponsibility, not these wars themselves, that make the costs of our foreign and domestic endeavors prohibitive. To think we can wade out of the mess we've made for ourselves without taxes or budget cuts in both defense and domestic programs is simply kidding ourselves.

(and for the record, I still don't think Obama's health care plan will be the last. Or at least I hope it isn't.)