Will someone please remind Republicans that the Cold War is over?

Our congressional sources tell us that the military hawks want a $200 billion raise for the Pentagon as part of this year’s “big, beautiful budget/tax bill.”  That’s big all right, but not beautiful. It would bring the DOD budget to over $1 trillion a year and make a mockery of any pretense that Republicans are committed to reducing deficit spending.

The cost of this buildup is close to twice as large as the actual price tag, because if we instead trimmed the massive waste in the defense budget, we could get a budget deal where every dollar of defense cuts could be matched by $1 of domestic cuts. That’s how we balanced the budget when Clinton was president.

Why not at least insist that any new high-priority national security initiatives be offset dollar-for-dollar with DOGE efficiency savings? There is no bigger bureaucracy on the planet than the Pentagon.

The coming war against China is economic, not military. The runaway federal spending and borrowing costs are our imminent national security threat. So is the fact that Johnny can’t read.

We are now spending more on defense than Russia, China, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and India COMBINED.

Surely this is enough.