It's the Weapons Economy, Stupid

By Bill Maher

The Washington Post recently addressed a series of myths about sequestration, including this one:

"MYTH: At least the automatic cuts will reduce runaway spending and begin to control the deficit.

What runaway spending? The $787 billion stimulus was a one-time expenditure that has come and gone. Under current law, not including the sequester, non-defense discretionary spending as a share of the economy will shrink to a level not seen in 50 years."

We were already cutting spending on every discretionary program but killing foreigners. Now we're finally making some trims there, too. 

On the one hand, we should be overjoyed that we've touched the real third rail of American politics and lived. On the other hand, it's depressing that this is the only way to do it; creating a crisis and pretending we can't get out of it.

In 2009, the GAO studied 96 major weapons programs and found that almost two-thirds of them had major cost overruns and delays. They were coming in -- on average -- nearly two years late and 40% over the price in the original contract. The cost to the taxpayers: $300 billion. Not for the weapons -- for overruns on the weapons.

I feel like we can find ways to fix that without gutting our freedom. Even if terrorists did take out our nine aircraft carrier groups, and seized Nashville and turned Twitty City into a mosque, we'd still have our 300 million guns.