The Salt Lake Tribune

  Common sense of the budget, strong on offense

   
By Rep. Lynn Woolsey       
   

It's been a long time coming, but finally I'm seeing the inklings of a movement in Congress to transfer wasteful Pentagon spending to programs that the American people need and care about.

With record deficits and an unprecedented budget crunch, there's extraordinary pressure to eliminate wasteful government spending - and the Pentagon is inching into the budget-cutters' crosshairs.

After all, it's been acknowledged for as long as I've been in Congress that the Pentagon wastes tens of billions of dollars each year on obsolete weapons, inefficiency and pork.

In fact, budget analysts on both sides of the aisle will tell you that there's no single category of discretionary spending that will turn up more savings, if subjected to budget scrutiny, than the Defense Department.

In the past, however, too many members of Congress have apparently feared being labeled "weak on defense" if they voted to trim wasteful spending from the Pentagon budget.

The prevailing attitude seems to have been that there's too great a political risk in doing the right thing - which is to stand up for taxpayers and call foul when tens of billions of dollars are being wasted on, for example, the construction of the new attack submarine, designed to fight the collapsed Soviet Union.

But times, it seems, may be changing. I am leading 38 of my Democratic House colleagues in introducing and supporting the "Common Sense Budget Act." This bill would transfer $60 billion in wasteful Pentagon spending - as identified by Reagan Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb - to our nation's real priorities.

To ensure the federal budget reflects the priorities of the American people, not the needs of an insatiable military-industrial complex. The Common Sense Budget Act offers a plan that strengthens our nation by investing in programs that benefit America's long-term security, like schools, health care, homeland security, reducing the budget deficit, and humanitarian foreign aid - without raising taxes.

Under the Common Sense Budget Act, which takes nothing away from Iraq or Afghanistan, fiscal allocations would be as follows: 

-Homeland Security: $5 billion a year to make up for funding shortfalls in emergency preparedness, infrastructure upgrades and grants for first responders.

-Energy Independence: $10 billion each year to kick the imported oil habit by investing in efficient, renewable energy sources.

-Deficit Reduction: $5 billion devoted to putting a dent in the $8.2 trillion national debt.

-Children's Health Care: $10 billion annually to provide health care coverage for the millions of uninsured American children.

-School Reconstruction: $10 billion over 12 years to rebuild and modernize every public K-12 school in the country.

-Job Training: $5 billion per year to retrain 250,000 Americans who have lost their jobs because of foreign trade.

-Medical Research: $2 billion a year to restore recent cuts to the National Institutes of Health budget.

-Global Hunger: $13 billion a year in humanitarian assistance that allows poor nations to feed 6 million children who are at-risk of dying from starvation every year.

Does that look like guns-versus-butter legislation? Well, it is. And I'm proud of it. People are beginning to understand that we live in a dangerous world and in tough economic times. We must give our troops what they need, while balancing our nation's other priorities.

We simply can't meet that challenge if our nation ignores the fact that tens of billions of dollars - enough money to do so much good for our country and the world - is flowing down the drain at the Pentagon.

Now is the time to stand up and say enough is enough.

Don't get me wrong. I'm sure I'll hear the "weak-on-defense" canard as my bill works its way through Congress.

But you can be sure that, rather than apologize, I will deliver a "strong-on-offense" response - namely that our nation cannot afford to treat the Pentagon as a sacred cow, off limits to budget scrutiny. It's not fair to taxpayers. It's not fair to kids without health insurance. It's not fair to our soldiers and their veteran's benefits.

With the fiscal challenges America faces, the stakes could not be higher. We must meet these challenges and focus our nation's resources where they belong - on the real priorities of the American people ... not on wasteful Pentagon spending.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey is a Democrat from California.