Fred Kaplan makes an excellent argument, as usual, for cutting the Defense Budget. I’d add that if the President wants to exempt all “national security” aspects of the budget from his proposed freeze, he should probably include infrastructure development in all its many forms, plus green energy programs (which will lower our reliance on oil from invidious regimes), plus education (you need smart people, especially mathematicians, scientists and engineers) to keep the country safe.
Indeed, if you exclude all those programs from the budget freeze, the only stuff left in it are pork for special interests (which never get cut) and programs to help poor people (which often do). I’m all for budget discipline. I’m especially in favor of budget discipline when it comes to Medicare, which is configured in an especially inefficient way (rewarding doctors for every test they perform rather than paying them salaries). But, as Obama said during the campaign, a budget freeze is a sledgehammer approach to a problem that requires a scalpel.