Defense cuts could cost 1.5 million jobs: lawmaker

And Obamacare will cost three or four times that many. Yet they are somehow going to get that number under 8% by October.

Wonder what you are basing that on?...the military is good at going to far off places and killing people, no doubt about it, but they are also notorious for wasting very large sums of money...can’t quite understand how anyone believes there are not very substantial savings to be had EVERYWHERE in government, and that includes the military. We are not taking about rationing bullets here, or cutting soldiers meals to once a day, but for every guy with a gun in their hand, there are probably 5 or more bureaucrats getting paid 3X as much for shuffling paper. Many of those bureaucrats shuffling paper are trying to get the lowest possible cost for parts and support, and exerting fiduciary oversight to prevent fraud and abuse. You can't have it both ways: oversight and responsible spending costs money in its own right. TC

Wonder what you are basing that on?...the military is good at going to far off places and killing people, no doubt about it, but they are also notorious for wasting very large sums of money...can’t quite understand how anyone believes there are not very substantial savings to be had EVERYWHERE in government, and that includes the military.

We are not taking about rationing bullets here, or cutting soldiers meals to once a day, but for every guy with a gun in their hand, there are probably 5 or more bureaucrats getting paid 3X as much for shuffling paper.

You meant to reply to somebody else, because I agree with you that a lot of money is wasted when it comes to the military, especially when it comes to civilian contractors. I retired from the military, but I also worked as a contractor through a couple of companies, and I saw plenty of waste on both sides.

A big problem is the larger defense contractors spend a lot of money on lobbying the critters in Congress and a lot of waste and inefficiency is created when they spread jobs around. When you have a large system like a fighter where manufacturing is scattered across the country to basically bribe the Congress critters, a lot of money is wasted. When you have somebody who sits on their ass doing piddly work in a well-protected base or in a "green" zone, and they are making 4-5 times the amount that the guys in uniform that are protecting them are making, there's a problem.

When we started really pushing to reduce the size of the military and push a lot of jobs off on civilians, a lot of people claimed it would save a lot of money, but I'm not seeing it. It's pretty clear now that the defense industry saw that as a chance to line their pockets.