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    Jim Jordan leaves the open possibility of cuts to the bloated Pentagon budget

    carson_cao1By No Comments7 Mins Read

    After a week of debate and negotiations, we have a Speaker of the House. As of yesterday, we now have a package of approved regulations and now the ‘work’ of our elected representatives begins – or at least it is supposed to.

    Making headlines, Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio has been running the Fox News circuit, hinting that one of the priorities of the new Republican House majority is to cut bloated spending.

    What can be in a chopping block?

    Naturally the usual Republican war hawks at the Department of Defense and idiosyncratic pro-military spending Democrats clutch their pearls and wonder how on earth we’ll protect the homeland if they dare make cuts to the incredibly bloated. Defense machine.

    What they don’t tell you is that the vast majority of defense spending doesn’t go to the military branches in the first place, except for all the garbage programs added to the NDAA year after year that require funding for various consultants and new citizens. bureaucracy to system.

    But luckily, dear reader, you have me, so let’s dive into what Congressman Jordan had to say this week and what it all means.

    Including the kitchen sink

    Congressman Jim Jordan hinted at cutting defense spending on Fox Business and Larry Kudlow’s show on “Fox News Sunday.”

    He rightly told Mr. Kudlow:

    “Everything has to be on the table when you have 30 something trillion dollars of debt and the interest payments are going to happen this fiscal year.”

    On Fox News Sunday, he touched on these loan payments with Shannon Bream, explaining:

    “We’re on pace to handle $500, $600 billion in debt payments just in interest payments.”

    That’s a lot of cheddar, and American taxpayers and future generations will be the losers, thanks to our leader’s inability to balance the budget. It’s fascinating that regular taxpayers would be thrown in jail and lose everything if they managed their household finances like the United States government manages our tax dollars.

    RELATED: Trump calls to expel GOP senators who voted for $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill

    So what does this mean? That means, as Congressman Jordan says, we have to review everything, including the Pentagon budget.

    Woke programs and bloated generals

    Jordan had earlier expressed a typical, robotic response to any hint of cutting the $800 billion Pentagon budget:

    “You have to look at everything and you do it in a way that doesn’t hurt our troops. Make sure our men and women in uniform get the pay they deserve.

    Certainly no one is in favor of cutting the pay of service members, especially since President Biden’s inflation forced many to go on food stamps this past year.

    Congressman Jordan points to two areas worth cutting:

    “But we need to look at the general, officer-to-enlisted ratio.”

    Now that’s fascinating. A boss once told me that he hoped I wouldn’t get promoted because he had one in the unit he was in charge of. “Too many chiefs and not enough Indians.”

    Not an idiom you might say in today’s military, but you get the point.

    Speaking about the colloquialism that was canceled in the name of social justice warriors, Congressman Jordan continued to touch on the second area:

    “…we have to look at all the wakeful nonsense we see now in our military and the money that goes into things like that.”

    So let’s see what they touch on one by one.

    You get a star, and you get a star!

    About damn time someone mentioned that we have too many generals in the military.

    Mr Jordan told Mrs Bream:

    “Frankly, maybe if we focused our military spending on soldiers and not have so many generals — the ratio of general officers to enlisted men is out of whack right now.”

    In 2017 there were about 900 active duty generals for about 1.3 million troops. That’s one civilian for every 1,400 service members.

    RELATED: Record-breaking ‘defense’ bill wastes untold sums on dysfunctional, redundant weapons systems

    To put this in perspective, at the height of World War II, there were 2,000 generals for 12 million troops, quick math, that’s one general for every 6,000 soldiers. For the record, finding the number of current generals works.

    Still, last year there were 653 generals in the four branches of the service, 963 if you include generals assigned to external commands like the Joint Special Command.

    With 1.4 million active duty military members, that’s roughly one general for every 1,500 troops. That is what we call ‘Rank Creep’. This leads to massive bureaucratic layers that stifle decision-making and increase costs for taxpayers.

    Go wok to go broke

    A Reagan Foundation poll from last year shows that half of Americans say waking habits have undermined military effectiveness.

    So let’s see what mindful practices they can cite?

    Last year we learned that the Department of Defense spent six million man-hours “developing, preparing, delivering, attending or assessing” to address climate change, diversity and extremism.

    Time is money, and a quick breakdown of these costs includes but is not limited to the following:

    • $535,000 for militant training
    • $476,874 on diversity training
    • $5,000 Climate Change Training

    And suppose you believe that those are the only real costs. In that context, I remind you that this same department has failed its fifth consecutive audit.

    how much is that $2 Trillion. To put it in perspective, it’s more Absolute GDP Except for 8 countries on the planet.

    So yes, there is certainly room for cutting.

    RELATED: Pentagon admits it can’t account for $2 trillion — again

    Rules and reality

    A new package of rules in the House would cap defense spending at 2022 levels for the next ten years. According to hysterical defense cheerleaders, this would “cut” 10% of the budget to about $75 billion.

    The latest defense bill added $45 billion more than the Defense Department had asked for, and a whopping $85 billion more than the president himself had asked for, so everyone should be on board.

    Data from the Progress poll found that 55% of Americans are concerned about bloated defense bills, especially those over $800 billion. This year’s defense bill was $858 billion.

    Additionally, this inflated money never goes to the Pentagon in the first place. According to the Institute for Security Policy Reform, 55% of defense funding went to private sector military contractors between 2002 and 2021.

    It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that cutting military funding will destroy our military’s lethality. But, unfortunately, our army is not as lethal as the war hawks would have you believe.

    The stranglehold the defense contractor lobbying machine has on Congress offers little hope that any real change will occur regarding waste in defense. The same bloated generals who repeatedly dodge accountability retire and sit on the same defense contractor boards that lobby the same lawmakers for more money.

    And so the world continues to turn, the taxpayers suffer and the elites continue to prosper.

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