Government Spending Never Stops Increasing

In The Right vs Left Game Nobody Wins

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “I think what is partially responsible here for what seems to be this lack of momentum or lack of enthusiasm is that there was a crop of Tea Party-themed candidates that were sent to Mordor on the Potomac in 2010.  As we have bemoaned over and over and over again, despite a few notable exceptions, they have largely just been assimilated.  They’ve joined the Borg Collective.  They’ve joined the Boehner Collective, and the Cantor Collective, the Chris Van Hollen Collective.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  I think what is partially responsible here for what seems to be this lack of momentum or lack of enthusiasm is that there was a crop of Tea Party-themed candidates that were sent to Mordor on the Potomac in 2010.  As we have bemoaned over and over and over again, despite a few notable exceptions, they have largely just been assimilated.

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They’ve joined the Borg Collective.  They’ve joined the Boehner Collective, and the Cantor Collective, the Chris Van Hollen Collective.  [mocking] “Mike, those guys are in different parties.”  So?

The party divide is not nearly as large as you think it is.  Even if you do think [mocking] “You can’t tell me there’s not a difference between the two parties,” maybe there is a slight difference between the two parties.  The fact of the matter remains that very little is different between when one is in control and the other is in the minority, or when the other one is in control and the roles are reversed.  Inescapably, we can draw a red line on a graph from 1931 till today and that red line moves in what direction as far as debt goes?  More.  It moves in what direction as far as the size of — even just look at the employee base of the federal leviathan.  It goes in what direction?  Other than one small drop when nine million men had to be discharged from the armed forces at the end of World War II, other than that one small drop, there is an inexorable line.  It just goes straight in one direction.  If you plot the trend line, it doesn’t matter which party is in control.

That doesn’t mean that you stop trying, but I understand people’s frustration with the political process.  Folks, I think that our battle is mostly a cultural one and a spiritual one.  I don’t think it’s political, because I think the political is informed by the cultural and spiritual.  Spiritual people who are pursuing a state of grace and harmony with the teachings of our Lord do not steal.  If they do, they better be going to confession or begging for forgiveness, and they better stop doing it.  Theft occurs when you transfer wealth.  We view a transfer of wealth as something that lefties do or liberals do.  That’s just not true!  All of them do it.

I’ll give you a great example of a transfer of wealth.  There was a bill that was passed by the Boehner House last week.  The bill called for the creation of or the building of ten new nuclear submarines, ten brand-new ones.  David Stockman, speaking of budgets and budget deficits and guys that were in the fight, and Stockman was.  He was Reagan’s budget director.  Stockman posted this the other day about — the story was out there; it’s not a hard story to find — about the submarines.  We already have a fleet of 70 submarines.  So we’re going to add ten new ones.  It’s because they need to be built in districts or states where they need the work.  It’s make-work.  It’s nothing more or nothing less.  David Stockman, “Pouring Keynesian Waste Into Davy Jones’ Locker: Yesterday’s $18 Billion ‘Upside Surprise’.”

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The algos were raging yesterday morning because April durable goods orders were up by an unexpected 0.8%. Well, yes they were: The US Navy inked a gigantic $18 billion order for 10 new nuclear-powered attack submarines during the month. Consequently, the actual 0.8% decline in industrial orders was transformed into a swell “upside” surprise.

But folks, the US Warfare State doesn’t need no more stinking nuclear attack submarines. It already has more than 70 in service, and several more beyond yesterday’s huge order were already in the pipeline.

The reason we don’t need them— beyond the vast redundancy in firepower already extant— is that attack submarines have one primary mission. Namely, to kill nuclear-powered submarines carrying the ICBMs of hostile powers who may have them aimed at US cities.

Here’s the deal. China has just three ICBM capable submarines which have a range under 5,000 miles and which have never been deployed in the blue water; and Russia’s rusting legacy fleet of 10 subs left over from the cold war (that would be the one which ended a quarter century ago) is basically mothballed in port.

During the most recent year, the Russian Navy’s operating tempo was so anemic as to amount to one SSBN submarine on the water at any given time. So even though they theoretically have 160 submarine launched ballistic missiles on their 10 ships compared to 656 for the US, 90% of Russia’s SLBMs could never be launched.

Stated differently, during the peak of the cold-war in 1983, the Soviet Navy conducted 105 patrols compared to 5 in 2012.  Yet back then we have far fewer attack subs on the water and what we had were far less lethal than today’s US fleet. Stated differently, the 70 attack subs we already have are advanced technology killers purchased at the peak of the Reagan build-up— and at a time after the current Russian fleet of aging SSBNs were already on the water!

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Mike:  So what do you need ten new ones for?  Because they want to spend the money, that’s why.  Again, you people that cannot tell the difference between military spending and government spending, why can’t you?  It’s still government spending.  For what purpose do you need the largest, most agile fleet of nuclear submarines on the face of the known universe when you already have the largest, most agile fleet of nuclear-powered submarines on the face of the planet?  It’s never about readiness.  It’s not about protection.  It’s not about defense.  It’s about offense, that’s what it’s about.  It’s also about making sure that those that work in those shipyards have something to build.  Yes, let’s build submarines that we can sink money into.

Eric:  One of the best things he said was if you want to change things, you’ve got to send new people there.  For some reason we just can’t get a grasp on this concept with 90 percent of incumbents returning and Congress having an approval rating of 12 percent.  It doesn’t make any sense to me.  I’d rather have some new blood in there who’s actually going to stick to his principles of good governance and not some 75-year-old man who probably doesn’t even know how to use a cell phone.

Mike:  He is Chris McDaniel from Mississippi.  That’s who Eric’s talking about.  Let’s also then make the connection here that if you’re going to send new people there, and they’re going to have principles, one of the principles that we want them to have, or that we should want them to have, is that peace is always desirable above war.  We have convinced ourselves, or some of us have allowed ourselves to be convinced that the opposite is true and that peace is only achieved through bellicosity.  That just defies reason.  There’s example after example after example of this.  The fact that $18 billion in spending is being spent through a Navy yard — you said Congress had an approval rating of 12 percent.  I guarantee you in the nearby cities or towns or areas where those nuclear submarines are going to be built, I bet the approval rating is more than 12 percent, especially if they know where their bread and butter is coming from.

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Again, the military-industrial complex, as Dwight David Eisenhower warned us about, is just that.  It’s Keynesianism for right-wingers.  There’s no material difference between Obama’s green energy plans, which are wrong, cockeyed, and horrible distortions of the energy market, and yes, that’s a transfer of wealth.

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There’s no difference between that transfer of wealth and transferring wealth to build submarines.  We are not at a time of war.  Yet, you say that and [mocking] “You’re a pansy.  You’re a pacifist.”  No, I’m not.  You’ve already got seventy subs on the water!  What is this, like the movie Matrix?  Do we need to have 7,000 of them out there?  Do we need to make sure that nothing can move anywhere on Earth without us being able to annihilate it, whether it’s in the air, whether it’s in the water?  Yet some of you deny that we’re an empire.  What would you call it then?  If an empire is not an entity that has the ability to flex its military muscle and might anywhere on the planet wherever it wishes to, then what is it?

End Mike Church Show Transcript