Reflections of a stormy petrel

For instance, Obama intends to cut the defense budget, totally eliminate ballistic missile defense funding, and force Pakistan to let us go into the Northwest Provinces and win the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. I see an obvious problem with this combined policy.

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And what about his accountancy, which ends up with America having 135% of its own population? You know, the promise to cut income tax for 95% of Americans when 40% of potential taxpayers pay no income tax at all already? If you sum up these two numbers, you will find that Obama's America has 135% of its own population - a logically fascinating concept.

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Well, Obama did campaign in 57 out of our 50 states ;-)

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Except he didn't promise to cut income tax for 95% of Americans; he promised to "[c]ut taxes for 95 percent of workers" (emphasis added). All workers pay payroll taxes; giving them a refundable tax credit lowers their net tax burden. (See the explanation from the AEI, hardly a fan of Obama).

The real question here is to whether the tax code should be that progressive. You might think so; I don't. But this is just getting stuff wrong.

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Except he didn't promise to cut income tax for 95% of Americans; he promised to "[c]ut taxes for 95 percent of workers" (emphasis added). All workers pay payroll taxes; giving them a refundable tax credit lowers their net tax burden. (See the explanation from the AEI, hardly a fan of Obama).

Unless we define "workers" in some very strange way (such as the Marxist one), the vast majority of Americans are "workers," so the math still doesn't work.

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Re-read what I wrote. He didn't promise to cut income tax; he promised to cut taxes. All workers pay taxes, even if it's only the payroll tax. Check out the AEI's explanation.

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But if he cuts all taxes, then those cuts which are not on income taxes are on indirect taxes. And indirect taxes are both blunt in their application and unpredictable in their effect. To predict a cut for the majority of Americans under those circumstances seems to me pretty irresponsible.

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I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Just so we're on the same page (you probably already know this), in the US, the entitlement programs are funded through a payroll tax called the FICA tax. For Social Security, the tax rate is 12.4%: half of that is paid by the employer, and half is withheld from the employee's wages, up until the limit of $102,000. (The economics of tax incidence tells us that the actual relative tax burden will depend on the relative elasticities of supply and demand, but that's another story.)

Obama's refundable tax credits (his campaign calls them the "Making Work Pay" credit) is basically designed to compensate the employee portion of the Social Security payroll tax: fully for workers who make $8,000 or less in wages each year, and partially for workers who make more than $8,000 but less than $85,000. A tax credit by definition means a net tax cut. See this graph in the AEI article.

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OK, we shall see. I admit that Obama has good advice - he is currently conferring with Warren Buffett, among others - and in general, the Democrats have long been much better on budget issues. Reagan wrecked the federal budget; Clinton slowly brought it back under control; Bush II wrecked it again. That is one thing one should hope will be better managed.

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WRITTEN FOUR YEARS LATER

And boy, was I wrong.

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Where did Obama say he intends to cut the defense budget? You might be thinking of this video, but if you listen carefully, all he says he wants to cut is missile defense (and slow the development of future combat systems). More to the point, Obama's defense adviser says defense spending's not going to decline in the first years of an Obama administration. Obama has certainly made hostile noises over the defense budgeting process, but as the article indicates, so has McCain. (In this video, he says he's "cutting billions and billions out of defense spending which are not earmarks.") Given that defense is a labor-intensive industry that's historically done well under the Democrats, I just don't see it.

On the other hand, take McCain, who announces a spending freeze with exceptions for defense, veterans care, and entitlements. Then his campaign says says he's not going to cut science. Then worker retraining. Finally, NASA.

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Cutting missile defense would be elminating the one class of recently-developed system we would most need in a showdown versus a small nuclear power. In fact, it would make outright atomic war far more likely in such a situation, since it would put us in a situation where we had to choose between launching a pre-emptive strike and accepting damage from nuclear weapons.

Obama has stated that he wants to force Pakistan to stop sheltering Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But if that's what he intends to do, we're very likely to be in a showdown with a small nuclear power in the very near future. Thus, his proposed policy makes no strategic sense.

In fact, the only kind of sense it makes is if one assumes that ballistic missile defense is a bad idea because the Republicans proposed it, and that hence getting rid of it would be delivering a "gotcha" to the Republicans. This is an irresponsible mode of determining defense priorities, to say the least!

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Fine, you think cutting missile defense is unwise and/or dangerous (though note that Obama supports a missile defense system against Iran; he doesn't want to eliminate missile defense spending). But if that's your basis for accusing Obama of making contradictory promises, it seems like an awfully thin reed. By those lights, every candidate would be inconsistent in the eyes of their opponents, since they all promise a strengthened economy, a safer America, and ponies for all, and their opponents don't think their policies will actually achieve that.

Now, this is making contradictory promises.

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Proposing a possible war against Pakistan and defense cuts, especially missile defense cuts, is contradictory in such a fundamental strategic sense that the implication is that either Obama knows nothing about strategy, or assumes that his audience doesn't. And it's a promise that he's going to have to break -- or suffer possible military disaster.

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Especially since a war against Pakistan would almost immediately turn into a two-front war against Iran and Pakistan, fought against two nuclear powers with very large armed forces from an inland position with no easy supply routes, hostile great powers in the back - both China and Russia, for different reasons, would love to see American armed forces humiliated - and based on a country which is itself unsubdued. America sweated blood to hold Iraq and Afghanistan in a situation where it had no open war-fighting needs against any real army; it is impossible to see how an open war against Pakistan could not result into the worst disaster in American history.

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America sweated blood to hold Iraq and Afghanistan in a situation where it had no open war-fighting needs against any real army; it is impossible to see how an open war against Pakistan could not result into the worst disaster in American history.

I don't think that it would have to end in disaster -- America is strong enough to overcome both Iran and Pakistan in open warfare. OTOH, if we got involved without appreciating the scale of the task and without BUILDING UP OUR FORCES first, I think that matters would pretty much go as you describe. Part of the problem I have with Obama on foreign policy is that he casually talked about forcing Pakistan to do things without seemingly grasping that this could mean war if Pakistan didn't yield, and without any apparent comprehension of just how tough a war it might be. One factor that would certainly work to our advantage is our possession of high-tech ABM systems which could greatly neutralize the advantage to Iran and Pakistan of their nuclear weapons -- which is why I see Obama's stated willingness to cut our ABM programs while risking this sort of war as worrisome, and contradictory.

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You have to remember that to sustain war-fighting in the area, you would need either an air bridge of Berlin proportions - and where are the resources for that, let alone the ability to defend them from any enemy attack? - or a seaborne landing to open a bridgehead from the south and build up a force large enough to open a new front that would swiftly become the main front, while at the same time still preserving the surrounded forces in Afghanistan from destruction. It would take forces of World War Two proportions. Also, in order to distract Pakistani and Iranian forces from Afghanistan and the beachhead, the Americans would have to engage in serious strategic bombing against the enemy, which would cause publicity so bad it would make Abu Ghraib look like a Disney movie. If Obama ever starts a war in these conditions, he will count as the worst military leader since Pietro Badoglio if not Ambrose Burnside.

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Yes, fighting that two-front war would require a World War II level of committment. That's why I said that Obama's proposed policies are either contradictory or very naive. I think he assumes that everyone will cooperate with his ends simply because he isn't Bush.

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