Everybody knows that – regardless of temporary bailout advantages – long term Government spending cuts are imperative to restoring the economy and restoring US prosperity.

The two big ticket items in our US budget are Military and Entitlements.   Interest on the debt is also substantial, but to cut that you need to … cut military and entitlements.  Nothing else really matters that much in terms of reducing the deficit and debt to levels that won’t cripple the future of our children.

So, my proposal is to do a MUCH better job of combining military expenditures and training in ways that support infrastructure projects.     This will require more research, but it seems odd to me that we invest tens of billions per year training soldiers to do things in isolation that could be helping build US infrastructure.  e.g. Building shelters, communications, etc.  Why not redirect some of this training to things that enhance our infrastructure here at home?    Obviously there are several obstacles to overcome – most will be bureaucratic in nature, some will come from the left wing who will fret that the military should not be integrated into everyday life in this fashion.   We should be able to overcome both of those.

Keeping soldiers safe should always be a very high priority, but too few defense advocates focus on this nearly as much as projecting big power in the form of complex and expensive systems and massive troop deployments.    I’d argue that the *only* area where we should basically not worry about costs is in troop safety.

…. more on this later ….    need to see what exactly we spend our money on in what Eisenhower correctly suggested would be a massive complex of unnecessary and wasteful spending.