Symbolic Cuts

Minimal Money, Real Impact Noted documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has waded into the fray over eliminating federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and sharply reducing the measly dollars we spend on the national endowments for the humanities and the arts. In a piece in the Washington Post, Burns - his Civil War documentary may be the best long-form television ever - asks us to remember that during the Great Depression somehow the country found the dollars to support artists, writers and photographers who produced some of the most enduring work of the 20th Century. Surely, he says, we can afford a fraction of a cent of our federal tax dollar for CPB and the endowments. In the interest of full disclosure, loyal readers need to know I have a strong bias here. I cut my journalism teeth years ago with a daily half-hour broadcast on public television. I have volunteered for 15 years on various boards dedicated to the mission of the public humanities and the bringing of thoughtful programs on American and world culture, history, literature, religion and philosophy to Idahoans and Americans. I'm a true believer in these well established and minimally funded institutions and I also understand the federal budget. The $420 million we spend on CPB, almost all of which goes to local public TV and radio stations and programs like those Ken Burns makes, and the $168 million we spend on each of the endowments is a total drop in the federal budget bucket. The Pentagon spends that much in an afternoon. Case in point, Boeing just got an award from the Defense Department to build a new generation of aerial tankers - price tag $35 billion. Assuming Boeing builds a full fleet of 179 tankers, that averages out to about $195 million per plane. That buys a whole lot of what the endowments and CPB provide Americans. I know, I know, we need new aerial tankers to replace those in service since Eisenhower was in the White House, but don't we also need a place - for a tiny fraction of the cost - where Ken Burns' documentaries reach a huge audience or where the humanities endowment supports a local museum or library? Congress and the president continue the gandy dance around the real need to address the federal budget deficit. We have a crisis in three areas - defense spending, Medicare and Social Security. We need to address a combination of very difficult tradeoffs. Extend the retirement age, means test Medicare, reduce the size and scope of our military power on every continent and raise taxes. It's easier to say than to cut, but there you have the real issues. Anyone who tells you we can address the dismal federal deficit by cutting CPB and the National Endowments is practicing demagoguery on the scope of Huey Long, the subject, by the way, of a Ken Burns' documentary. Much of this debate, it must be noted, is about ideology rather than real budget savings. Some conservatives assail public broadcasting or the pointy headed humanities and arts community as the preserve of "liberals." Nonsense. William F. Buckley found a home on PBS. Were the great man alive today, do you think he could find a place on Fox or CNN? Not a chance. Listen to a week of The NewsHour or Morning Edition and really consider the range of views, opinion and ideology you hear. Public TV and radio have become one of the few real clearinghouses of ideas about the American condition. Not liberal, not conservative, but truly fair and balanced. America is a country of ideas. We have thrived for as long as we have because we value the big debate, the chance for lots of voices - from Ken Burns to the Red Green Show (on PBS) to the Trailing of the Sheep Festival and a summer teacher institute in Idaho (funded by the Idaho Humanities Council) - to be heard, considered, rejected and embraced. We must get serious about the federal deficit. We must also recognize that a guy as talented as Ken Burns would never have a chance in the "marketplace media." A long-form documentary on baseball, jazz, the National Parks or World War II simply won't find a place in modern commercial broadcasting. So, eliminating that platform is really a decision to eliminate the ideas represented there. If we lose what a Ken Burns represents, we lose a connection with our history and our culture that simply can't be replaced. We will regret it, but not as much as our children.

Getting Serious

Defense Cuts = Deficit Control You'll hear a lot of politicians making speeches over the next few days regarding the imperative of getting the federal budget under control. Few will, I predict, be arguing for cutting the massive U.S. defense budget. If they're not talking about defense they're just not serious. In inflation adjusted terms, we're spending more money on the Pentagon than we did during the Vietnam War. We're spending more than we spent in the first year of World War II. No kidding. Talk about something that is not sustainable, yet it is hardly seriously debated in Washington, Boise or Butte. Give credit to Defense Secretary Robert Gates for starting the conversation about the need to reduce military spending, but then give yourself a reality check. The Gates budget for next year, released today by President Obama, is $553 billion. The cranky old Republican who co-chaired Obama's deficit reduction commission, former Sen. Alan Simpson, calls Gates' effort to reduce - "crappy little cuts." Further reality check - that $533 billion figure does not include what will likely be another $118 billion for actually fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As McClatchy reported, the Pentagon budget for next year will "mark the 14th year in a row that Pentagon spending has increased, despite the disappearing presence in Iraq. In dollar terms, Pentagon spending has more than doubled in 10 years. Even adjusted for inflation, the Defense Department budget has risen 65 percent over the past decade." Lawrence Korb, a senior Defense Department official in the Reagan Administration, argues that the first place to start to trim the Pentagon budget is "reducing or eliminating funding for a number of unnecessary weapons programs, such as V-22 Osprey, rolling back the post-Sept. 11 growth in the ground forces and reducing the number of American forces deployed abroad outside of Iraq and Afghanistan." The U.S. maintains more than 800 military installations around the world in 46 counties. That contributes just a few bucks to the deficit we all worry about. The American Empire is costly to maintain. Fact in, in the budget language of the day, it is not sustainable. Devotees of Ronald Reagan give him credit for bring the Soviet Union to its knees, in part because the old Communist state just couldn't keep spending vast amounts on its military in an effort to keep up with us. Here an example of part of the problem. Virtually every Congressional district in the country has a financial stake - jobs, bases, contractors - who live or die by the defense budget. Hence this story from the Columbus, Ohio Dispatch - "Central Ohio dodging a bullet on defense cuts." The paper says with reference to a proposed new Marine amphibious vehicle set to be manufactured in Ohio: "...lawmakers of both parties are less willing to cut defense spending in their states, fearing that it could lead to a loss of jobs. "'I think it's necessary for our national defense,' Rep. Steve Austria, R-Beavercreek, said of the Marine vehicle. 'A lot of money has been invested in this vehicle.' "'Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said that 'in some sense, it's what makes the Marines the Marines. You don't just cancel this and waste the investment ... that we've already made as taxpayers. This program needs revamping, it needs updating, it needs perhaps a different direction. But we build on this rather than canceling it.''' Translation for both Republicans and Democrats: don't cut the military budget in my state, but gosh this federal spending really is out of control. The vast U.S. military-industrial complex has a vice grip hold on our economy, but in a way that is, there's that word again, unsustainable. We're not competing with Reagan's "evil empire" anymore. Today we are the lone military superpower and have projected our military power around the world much as the British Empire did in the 1800's. As the lone superpower, we certainly spend like a superpower. Hope it doesn't bankrupt us.

Tax Cut Politics

Fiscal Constraint Can Wait Considering the strum und drang of many Democrats reacting to President Obama's "deal" with congressional Republicans to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, one would think that there was ever a serious chance that Congress would actually change tax policy while the economy remains in the ditch. Wasn't gonna happen, but if there is a missed fiscal responsibility moment here it may turn out to be the failure by Obama and Democrats to leverage the moment to force a long-term deal to get the nation's fiscal house in order. Time will tell whether it was a missed opportunity. Announcing the tax deal, Obama acknowledged the obvious - the economy would not react well to a tax hike on the upper 2% or so of taxpayers even if most everyone else would see little if any change in tax rates. Add to that economic reality the fact that Republicans have largely won the broad political message battle over taxes and its impossible not to conclude - Keith Olbermann aside - that the President had little choice but to give way on his campaign pledge to let the tax cuts expire for the wealthiest taxpayers. The stark fiscal reality remains however, even as the politics of the moment crowd totals up the winners and losers. The co-chairman of the President's Commission on getting the budget deficit under control, Democrat Erskine Bowles, nailed the missed opportunity. Had Democrats been thinking along with Obama, they might have seized this moment to press for the grand plan to deal with the terrible mess both parties have created over the last decade. Democrats have yet to conclude that the country is ready for a call for shared sacrifice, pain and realistic action to cut spending, enhance revenue, scale back entitlements and reduce defense spending. Fiscal constraint will have to wait apparently, while all of us what for adults in both parties to begin to deal with nation's real fiscal problems. Still, given the push back from some Democrats, Obama displayed both political courage and political pragmatism in getting his deal. He also, importantly, got an extension of unemployment benefits that will have the benefit of keeping real money in the hands of real people who will spend it. Over the longer term, with this deal Obama may have also taken a step toward reassuring some of the independents who seem to have abandoned him in droves. Here is the real political reality: if Obama and Democrats don't make serious progress in getting the economy moving by Labor Day 2011, and moving in a way that most people feel in their bones as well as their pocketbooks, he and many othe Democrats won't have to worry about being around in 2013 to deal with controlling the deficit.

Those Awful Earmarks

Just About the Least of the Problems The Constitution of the United States of America says in Article I, Section 9: "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time." Just to be clear, it is the specific duty of the Congress of the United States to appropriate money. The Founders set it up that way. Deciding the priorities of how the federal government spends your money is what Congress does. The federal budget represents one of the most excruciatingly complex processes in our democracy. It is difficult to explain in simple English, but it goes something like this: Federal agencies, through the Executive Branch (the president) present requests to the Legislative Branch (Congress). Congress considers those recommendations and authorizes a certain level of spending for, say, the Department of Defense. Then the Appropriations Committees of the House and Senate determine how much will be spent on this weapons system or that air base. A tiny fraction of the money authorized - one or two percent - has typically been directed to certain projects or purposes by your representatives. Think back to Article I, Section 9. These directed appropriations are the now toxic and dreaded earmarks. Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, the GOP leader in the Senate, has been a champion of securing earmarks for his state - $1 billion in recent years - but he has now sworn off the dirty business. Same goes for Colorado Democrat Mark Udall. President Obama is on the earmark ban-wagon. Most of these sensible legislators and the president are vowing to disown earmarks not because ending their use really has anything to do with controlling the massive federal budget, but because the dreaded earmark has become a symbol for an out of control federal budget. Symbols can be useful, but frankly this debate is not helpful because it obscures the real challenges of controlling the budget.

Eliminating earmarks, even if the ban is strongly enforced and enterprising appropriators resist finding ways to finesse the ban, will reduce the budget by a tiny, tiny fraction. It's the equivalent of filling your gas tank with 50 bucks worth of fuel and then not squeezing the last three or four cents of gas into the tank. You might save a few cents at the pump, but you've still spent 50 dollars on gas. Former Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming, the co-chair of the controversial deficit reduction commission, dismisses the earmark ban as "sparrow belch." I think that means not consequential.

Earmarks are not the problem with the federal budget - not even close. The real problem is to provide a factual, realistic framework for what needs to be done to control the budget; a framework that the American public can understand. In short, political leaders need to do something that has virtually disappeared in our politics - they need to educate and inform in a sensible, candid manner.

If we devote all of the future debate about the budget to sideshows like bans on earmarks, the American people will never get engaged on what really needs to be done. Certainly there have been abuses of the earmark. Randy "Duke" Cunningham is in federal prison for essentially selling earmarks for political and personal favors, but the earmark is also the way a small state secures research dollars for a state university or a small hospital gets new equipment.

Banning earmarks will thwart another Duke Cunningham, but the cure may be worst than the disease and, fundamentally, a ban won't mean a thing to the deficit.

Other emerging strategies won't do much either. New GOP leaders in the Congress are proposing, as a budget strategy, a return to 2008 or earlier budget levels. Such a move might cut $100 billion in spending. The current deficit is about $1.3 trillion.

Small steps, including symbolic cuts like banning earmarks, don't just fail to address the deficit problem they risk being intellectually dishonest and they may serve to avoid doing what is really necessary - a wholesale assessment of spending and taxing and significant adjustments in both.

You can see why politicians are reluctant to engage in this serious conversation. Closer to home, a new poll in Idaho shows how vast the disconnect has become between public wants and public realism and understanding. The new poll says, in essence, that Idahoans, with the legislature facing a $340 million deficit at the state level, want no more budget cuts and no tax increases. Oh, if pressed, we could handle a big increase in the cigarette tax. This is the cake and eat too approach to fiscal reality.

The wise and measured Fareed Zakaria, writing in TIME, wonders if this looming debate over the budget and the deficit signals a fundamental turning point in American fortunes. "Historians may well look back," he says, "and say this was the point at which the U.S. began its long and seemingly irreversible decline."

It may indeed be a rare moment in American history when serious people step forward to talk about serious issues, or we may just settle for banning earmarks.

"We Need to Listen..."

Time for an Adult Conversation? I listened to CNN's Candy Crowley the other night as she interviewed the new Congresswoman-elect from South Dakota, Kristi Noem. Noem, who defeated the incumbent Democrat last week, was pressed repeatedly on how she intended to keep her promises to reduce spending and balance the out of control federal deficit. Her answer: We need an adult conversation, but no specifics. Crowley pressed her, but what about specifics? Noem was smiling when she said "we need an adult conversation" about these things. "I ran on the campaign that we needed smaller, more limited government," Noem said in another interview, "we needed to cut our spending, we needed to make some tough decisions to make sure small businesses could still survive and exist. And that resonated across South Dakota." It certainly did and it resonates all across America. It will now be a fascinating exercise in political jujitsu to see how the newly elected - and re-elected - deal with the you-know-what that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the leaders of the bi-partisan deficit commission, just put in their pockets. Bowles and Simpson offered an early sneak preview this week of some of the ideas that simply must be on the table if Congresswoman-to-be Noem and others are serious about their campaign promises. Predictably, the "dead on arrival" proclamations are already being issued, one by Nancy Pelosi who almost instantly declared her opposition. That's crazy. President Obama said the adult thing, "before anybody starts shooting down proposals, I think we need to listen, we need to gather up all the facts." Adult conversations really need to begin with the facts. Here are a couple: we're not going to control the deficit by "symbolic" cuts in small discretionary spending, but nonetheless look for assaults on things like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments as the sole answer. When you hear the would-be adults debate these issues, if the first thing you hear is that we need to go after the Peace Corps budget, you know you're listening to the kids squabble and not the adults converse. We are also not going to control the deficit without addressing three sacred cows: entitlements (like Social Security and Medicare), the defense budget and the tax structure. Simply can't happen. Adults, in conversation, know that and honest politicians in both parties need to start leveling with the American people. Just one more adult thought: the U.S. defense budget, thanks in large part to endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now nearly as large as the defense budgets of the rest of the world combined. Do you think there is some savings to be had there? "If people are, in fact, concerned about spending, debt, deficits and the future of our country," Obama said yesterday, "then they're going to need to be armed with the information about the kinds of choices that are going to be involved, and we can't just engage in political rhetoric." You can get elected in America on a theory of how government and the economy works, but the reality of governing is based on facts, pain, shared sacrifice, honesty and candor. Let the adult conversation begin.

Is 2010 Really 1938?

Getting an Economic Consensus There are no perfect historical parallels. Nothing is ever precisely like it was in another time. At best, history can help illuminate the present and should, if we're paying attention, help us avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. Take 1938, for example. But, alas we are Americans. We can't get agreement on how to crown a national college football champion, how can we possibly get consensus on what to do with the economy? President Obama went to Cleveland this week to roll out a plan for more stimulus spending on infrastructure and small buisness tax cuts as a way to get people back to work. He was greeted by reactions ranging from ridicule to yawning. Meanwhile, House Speaker-in-Waiting John Boehner, developing economic policy while he measures the drapes, started dropping hints about what a Republican Congress would do with spending (cut it, including unspent stimulus dollars), the economy (grow it) and taxes (leave the Bush cuts in place). All the while leaving room for a few well placed subpoenas. These two versions of economic policy couldn't be more at odds. It does sound a good deal like 1937 and 1938. As Franklin Roosevelt's Democrats faced the mid-terms in his sixth year in office, the Great Depression was in its eighth year. Wall Street was restive. Labor unions were sitting down on the job. Democrats were frantic and the president's counselors were divided. Should FDR double down on spending and fiscal policy aimed at reducing unemployment or should the administration send a message to the markets and business that it was determined to get a ballooning budget under control? Confronted with what historian David Kennedy has described as, "repeated budget deficits, escalating regulatory burdens, threats of higher taxes, mounting labor costs, and, most important, persistent anxiety about what further provocations to business the New Deal had in store," business confidence was sapped. "Capital," Kennedy said, "was hibernating." Sounds familiar, eh? At a pivotal Cabinet meeting late in 1937, FDR fumed about his advisers constantly telling him about the sorry state of the economy, but "nobody suggests what I should do." His economic and political advisers eventually won the debate. The president's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, a balanced budget advocate, put it succinctly. "What business wants to know is: Are we headed toward state Socialism or are we going to continue on a capitalistic basis?" FDR's chief political lieutenant, Jim Farley, chimed in. "That's what they want to know," that the administration would reduce spending and balance the budget to reassure business and the markets. "All right, Jim; I will turn on the old record," Roosevelt responded. A new fiscal policy aimed at reducing spending and balancing the budget was ordered. The New York Times' Paul Krugman argues that FDR's decision brought on the "Roosevelt Recession" of 1938, caused unemployment to top out at 20% and contributed to stunning Democratic losses - six Senate seats and 71 seats in the House - in the 1938 mid-terms. What's more, Krugman asserts - and he's critical of Obama from the left for being too timid with his stimulus efforts - the public in the late 1930's took exactly the wrong lesson from FDR's shift in policy. Americans became convinced that stimulus spending and job creation efforts hadn't worked and wouldn't work. That debate, check the morning paper, still rages. I keep thinking there must be some middle ground somewhere in the current debate, but I've been wrong before. Couldn't we get something approaching national consensus around two or three major issues? One, Wall Street and investment banking excesses must be brought under control. Does anyone really think that what happened in the run up to the financial collapse shouldn't be avoided in the future if at all possible? Regulating greed and excess is not a partisan issue. Two, spending on well-conceived public works (OK, infrastructure) is both a good long-term investment and good short-term job stabilizer and, one hopes, job creator. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said recently that the stimulus has - big surprise - increased the deficit and reduced unemployment. And, three, the deficit needs to come down, but maybe in a planned, systematic way. Maybe the timing on the expiration of those Bush-era tax cuts is really not very conducive to getting capital out of hibernation. Perhaps a compromise is in order? Someone, the president or John Boehner or the ghost of Henry Morgenthau needs to find a way to knit all the pieces together into a 2010 whole cloth of economic growth, job creation and fiscal sanity. Not holding your breath? I understand. There is a poem entitled "Nineteen-Thirty-Eight" by Andrea Hollander Budy. It's about a young woman who lies about not graduating from high school in 1938: yanked out when her father lost his job. Now it was her turn to make herself useful, he told her. Nineteen-Thirty-Eight was not a particularly good year and not one to repeat. That much history tells us very clearly.

A Cross of Iron

A Debate About Everything Except What Matters President Obama spoke to the nation from the Oval Office this week about the end of combat operations in Iraq. His advisers said to everyone who would listen that it was time to "turn the page" in the eighth year of the war - a longer period than U.S. involvement in World War I and II combined - and focus on the real threats to U.S. security in Afghanistan and to the need to rebuild the economy at home. It was only the second time during his increasingly troubled presidency that Obama has used the Oval Office stage to talk directly to the nation and the world. We'll see soon enough if the message got through. One certainty that is obvious, even given the withdrawal of thousands of U.S. troops from Iraq, is that our military men and women are going to be deployed in the region for most of the rest of our lifetimes. The consequences - budgetary and otherwise - of these open-ended deployments are hardly debated in the broad sweep of American politics, but make no mistake they are intimately connected to the roaring and constant debate in Washington, D.C. over budgets, deficits and tax cuts. I've only been in the Oval Office once. Bill Clinton was president, but the real presence in that relatively small room was the ghost of everyone who has ever had the awesome and lonely responsibility that goes with sitting at that big desk in that historic house. During Obama's speech this week my thoughts turned to the last general to sit there - Ike. Dwight David Eisenhower had the good timing - or luck or whatever - to occupy "the Oval" during the 1950's. The 1950's, as David Halberstam wrote in his masterful study of the decade, was a time "captured in black and white, most often by still photographers...not surprisingly, in retrospect the pace of the fifties seemed slower, almost languid." Eisenhower, a great general who mastered the logistics and planning of modern warfare, is often remembered for a laissez faire approach to the presidency. True enough in some respects. Eisenhower was slow off the mark on civil rights and his silence for too long on the excesses of Joe McCarthy have appropriately earned him low makes from historians. However, with respect to foreign affairs and the projection of American military power, Eisenhower was anything but slow off the mark or disengaged. The common sense the general/president applied to what he famously called "the military-industrial complex" is sorely missing today. As Obama attempts to shift American attention and resources from what some have called the three trillion dollar war in Iraq to the challenge of mounting an effective counter insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, the nation's attention is fixed firmly on other concerns. Most Americans are much more concerned about the still stumbling economy and the rising deficit than the cost and consequences of never ending war. Yet those two issues - a hugely costly war and palpable worry about the economy and debt - can't help but be related. Perhaps because we don't like to confront the cause and effect of ultra-expensive wars and the mountain of debt we face, we struggle with the cognitive dissonance of holding two conflicting thoughts in our political minds at the same time. We seem to think, and few in Congress seem willing to debate the truth of the thought, that we can pursue trillion dollar wars and contain the budget and growing debt at the same time. The details of the federal budget - so often commented upon, but so seldom understood - can bring on the MEGO effect - My Eyes Glaze Over, but the numbers do matter. An excellent recent piece in Commonweal magazine lays it out in grim detail. Ronald Osborn, a Bannerman Fellow with the Program in Politics and International Relations at the University of Southern California, wrote the Commonweal piece. Here is part of the context Osborn provides on how military spending and the cost of ours wars is helping drive us into fiscal quick sand. "The federal budget for 2010 is about $3.5 trillion," Osborn writes. "Of this amount, $2.2 trillion consists of 'nondiscretionary' spending, or items that must be paid for by prior law, including Social Security ($695 billion), Medicare and Medicaid ($743 billion), and interest on the national debt ($164 billion). These costs are all expected to rise exponentially in the coming years as the baby-boom generation enters retirement. The remaining $1.3 trillion of the federal budget is not mandated by prior law but disbursed according to our elected officials' priorities. This is the government's 'discretionary spending.' Of this amount, about $534 billion will be given in 2010 to the Department of Defense and another $55 billion to Veterans Affairs. Defense spending does not include, however, the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, counted as separate items in the budget under the category of 'contingency operations.' In 2010 alone, the wars are slated to cost taxpayers an additional $205 billion, including $76 billion in supplemental spending for 2009 expenses. And the 2011 budget, which increases the DOD's base budget by $20 billion and the budget for the wars by another $30 billion, already includes a $33 billion supplemental request to cover 2010 war costs." Eyes glazed over yet? There is more. "Even excluding 'black operations,' whose budgets are kept secret from the public but nearly doubled in the Bush years to an estimated $32 billion, as well as other programs with strong military overlays (such as NASA and the Department of Homeland Security, whose annual budget has grown to $43 billion), and leaving out the supplemental war spending this year that will appear only on next year's books, military related spending in 2010 will total well over $700 billion - approximately 55 percent of all discretionary spending. The United States will spend nearly as much this year on its military as the rest of the world combined; and America together with its NATO allies will account for about 70 percent of global military spending." Osborn next points out the obvious, but regularly neglected fact that most of that spending is financed by debt. And it is not the debt of my parent's generation. Mom and Dad bought war bonds. We borrow from China and Japan. If you believe, as most rational folks do, including the co-chairs of the bi-partisan Presidential Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, that spending must be cut and revenues (make that taxes) increased if we are to begin to bring the deficit under control, then it just doesn't compute to leave the costs of the endless wars floating out in budget never-never land, untouched and essentially ignored. Ike, the old general, knew something about military spending. After all, he planned and executed the two most impressive - and costly - Allied initiatives of World War II - the North Africa invasion in 1942 and the Normandy landings in 1944. Yet Eisenhower would argue in the first year of his presidency, 1953, that a permanent war economy "is not a way of life at all, in any true sense," but, "humanity hanging from a cross of iron." One of Eisenhower's better biographers, Michael Korda, has noted the irony of Ike's famous farewell warning about America becoming a "garrison state" as a result of what he saw, even in 1960, as the growing influence of "the military-industrial complex." After all, Eisenhower had spent the vast majority of his adult life as part of the vast complex that he had played such a pivotal role in mobilizing to win a war. "Yet as early as 1945," Korda writes, "when he had argued against using the atomic bomb on the Japanese, (Eisenhower) was beginning to have doubts about the immense influence of defense contracting and new weapons systems over American politics and policies...the day after his (farewell) speech he complained about the proliferation of advertisements in the pages of American magazines showing Atlas and Titan rockets, as if they were the only things Americans knew how to make." The next time you hear a political leader - Republican or Democrat - lament the cost of "entitlements" like Social Security or Medicare, while arguing for further or continuing tax cuts, ask yourself whether we can ever get the nation's fiscal house in order without addressing the real elephant in the budget room, what the last general to sit in the Oval Office called America's permanent war economy.