And there are other ways to make substantial budget cuts. Let's take the Navy. With its 11 aircraft carrier battle groups, each accounting for some 30,000 sailors and base personnel as well as billions of dollars' worth of floating weaponry, it's a ripe target for the budget axe. These carrier groups, nine of which are sitting in harbors in the US doing nothing, each cost $3 billion per year just to operate (or not operate!), not counting the huge cost of construction, nuclear refueling, periodic repairs, aircraft replacement and maintenance, weapons acquisition and decommissioning. Likewise the Navy's vastly excessive 18 Trident nuclear subs, 14 of which each carry 20 huge Trident missiles each with multiple warheads making one such sub capable of launching armaggeddon on any enemy all by itself, could be cut down to one or two such floating nuclear menaces with no loss of US security, but with a savings of $3 billion per mothballed sub. (The other four Trident subs have been converted to carry Tomahawk cruise missiles whose purpose is launching illegal missile salvos at third world enemies and should be brought home simply on principle, for similar savings.)
For that matter, virtually the entire Air Force, with a 2020 budget of $165 billion which includes its enormous number of fighters and fighter-bombers, and its strategic bomber force of B-52s, B-1 and B-2 Stealth bombers and other aircraft and personnel, could be eliminated with no significant loss in US security. This is because a couple of those virtually impregnable Trident subs mentioned above would alone be sufficient to deter any potential enemy from attacking the US. Meanwhile the rest of the Air Force fleet is really for "force projection" in the Third World, and thus is part of the American imperial foreign policy we currently have and need to end.
Just based upon what Koshgarian has written and the Times published, it should be clear to any rational American that the US is being spent into the ground by its imperial foreign policy and its military strategy of global dominance - a policy that decades of experience has shown has done nothing to make either the world or the US safer, but that has led to us living in a nation that has become virtually a third world country itself in terms of education, health care, transportation infrastructure, environmental protection, worker safety, standard of living, life expectancy, infant mortality, and democratic freedom.
What's needed now is more transparency and truth from the NY Times and other mainstream media. Koshgarian's article is a great starting point. But the political debate, and the journalism covering this issue, then needs to broaden and deepen.
Koshgarian also readily adds that her article's focus on how the cited $300 billion in savings from military budget cuts could fund Medicare for All fails to explain that in fact no extra funding is probably even needed for such a radical reform. It's not just that such a reform could be funded, as Sen. Sanders has said, by a small tax on stock and bond trading and a big increase in taxes on the wealthy and corporations. In fact, savings that would come from moving away from a medical system based upon private insurance and for-profit health companies, hospitals and physicians to one funded by a single government insurer able to negotiate lower costs and coverage for all Americans would end up being "vastly cheaper" than our current system. In fact, she points to a recent study by the University of Massachusetts' Political Economy Research Institute, which that a Medicare for All program such as that proposed by Democratic presidential contender Sanders, because of such savings as have been demonstrated by other countries that operate a single-payer system have discovered, rather than costing $300 billion more to operate, could save 10% on current costs per person or about $300 billion per year!
Among the examples of the kind of huge savings to be obtained almost immediately from adoption of a single-payer system: an end to private insurance premiums, co-pays and deductibles as well as employer premium payments to insurers, an end to current Medicare programs and even to Veterans medical care and health care programs for active duty military and their dependents, an end to Medicaid, the woefully inadequate and bureaucratically plagued program for the poor, elimination of the terribly complex and often prohibitively expensive subsidized "Affordable" Care Act program, and the end of "charity care" for the uninsured, provision of which by hospitals inevitably inflates other people's hospital bills and insurance premiums.
So one big question is why candidates and advocates of Medicare for All like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, allow themselves to get caught up in idiotic debates over whether setting up a Canadian-style single-payer, government- funded health care system would require increasing middle-class taxes or not? Why don't they start pointing instead to the option of slashing pointless and even dangerous Pentagon spending?
"I think that there is a fear among progressives about being accused of being 'soft on defense,'" suggests Koshgarian, "but I think that is an outdated perception of public attitudes. People are ready to start seriously shifting Pentagon spending to fund other things." She points to a new poll just completed by Public Citizen which finds that by a margin of 52% to 34%, American voters say they would support shifting money from war to domestic needs.
The actual question asked read:
"According to the Congressional Budget Office, the US is expected to spend $738 billion on its military in 2020. Some say that maintaining a dominant global military footprint is necessary to keep us safe and is worth the cost. Others say that money could be better spent on domestic needs like health care, education or protecting the environment. Based on what you've just read, would you support or oppose re-allocating money from the Pentagon budget to other priorities?"
By a more than 3-1 margin (66% to 18%), Democratic voters say they favor such a shift in funding. Among independents, that margin is 46% to 39%. Even among Republicans 39% favored shifting funding from the Pentagon to human needs with 52% opposed to the idea.
Clearly then, progressive Democrats including Sanders, should be hitting this issue head on. Instead of ducking and weaving on the issue of funding a Medicare for All single-payer reform of America's current overpriced, bureaucratic and woefully inadequate health care system, reform advocates and candidates like Sanders and Warren should be declaring that such a reform would actually save money. They can also say that if more funding were to prove needed, it should be taken from military spending, which should be massively cut in any case and used to fund other urgent social and environmental needs if not needed for health care.
As for our pathetic and grossly overrated "free press," instead of one shockingly honest op-ed piece on cutting the Pentagon budget to fund health care reform we need a sea-change in journalism to make investigating the decades-long hijacking of our taxes for war a top priority.
The Times, which has acknowledged the value of this debate by publishing Koshgarian's excellent article, should take the lead. It should start by reporting on the Public Citizen poll, and also stop questioning how candidates "plan to pay" for Medicare for All proposals. If that paper won't do this, other news organizations should pick up the job and run with it.
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