Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) is upset about the "sequester" cuts that will soon become a reality if Congress doesn't find another way to reduce the budget deficit. It's not the cuts that will hurt American citizens that he's upset about. He's fine with cutting education, food stamps, school lunch programs, Headstart, environmental cleanup, unemployment compensation, and a variety of other programs that would further devastate already hurting Americans.It's the defense budget he's worried about. He thinks the automatic cuts to the military budget (which would amount to about 7.5% according to some experts) "would destroy the military". And he has a solution to save the military -- restore all of the cuts and replace them with about $1.2 trillion in cuts to Obamacare (over a 10 year period). In short, he's willing to let many millions of Americans go without health insurance as long as the corporations in the military-industrial complex can continue selling overpriced and unnecessary weapons systems to the government.
The chart above shows how ridiculous his "destroy the military" statement really is. The United States spends over 45% of all the money spent on the military in the entire world. This chart shows the top five spenders on their military among all nations (in U.S. dollars). Note that the United States military budget could be chopped in half (reduced by 50%), and it would still be twice as large as the spending by any other nation.
The truth is that the military cuts included in the "sequester" are the only cuts that make sense. The other programs that make up discretionary spending have already been severely cut. It is time for the military, especially the military-industrial complex, to get its share of the budget-cutting -- and there is a lot of fat in the bloated military budget that could be cut without harming national defense at all.
Senator Graham doesn't really care about the budget or the American people. Like his Republican comrades, he is simply acting to try and put more government (taxpayer) money into corporate coffers. And he doesn't mind telling outrageous lies to accomplish that.
