What are the Tea Party doing to cut spending?

Bachmann Farm Reaped $252K in Gov't Subsidies

Free-market fan is a closet welfare queen, writes Yasha Levine

(Newser) - Rep. Michelle Bachmann is one of the Capitol's most vocal opponents of socialized medicine?but she's happy to take government handouts for socialized dairy and corn, writes Yasha Levine. Records show that the Minnesota Republican's family farm raked in almost $252,000 in agricultural subsidies between 1995 and 2006, Levine

The "limited magnitude" of both debt plans put forward by congressional leaders would not put the nation's AAA credit rating back on solid footing, Moody's Investors Service announced Friday.

"Reductions of the magnitude now being proposed, if adopted, would likely lead Moody's to adopt a negative outlook on the AAA rating," the credit rating agency said in a new report. "The chances of a significant improvement in the long-term credit profile of the government coming from deficit reductions of the magnitude proposed in either plan are not high."

Our military budget now is $447 billion. A billion is 1,000 million. Sometimes it seems to this old $250-a-month sergeant as if we're buying too many weapons for wars we no longer fight. Maybe our purchasing agent in the Pentagon ought to be replaced.

Our military leaders work pretty much in secret. They say they don't want our enemies to know, but sometimes, I think they don't want us to know, either.

Look at some of the weapons we have and then look at the wars we fight.

We have enough nuclear weapons to wipe out civilization. No one should have any, but I'm enough of an American to be glad we do. We have a lot of unnecessary stuff, though.

The Air Force flies 30 different kinds of airplanes. That's good for the airplane industry, not so good for the rest of us who have to pay for them. Twenty different planes wouldn't have been enough? The Stealth bomber costs $1 billion, $1 million.

The Pentagon ordered 21. How would you like to have what one Stealth Bomber costs to pay teachers in your local school?

There is a multi-billion-dollar boneyard for not-very-old airplanes in Arizona. They never flew much, and they'll never fly again. You're looking at a $100 billion-dollar parking lot you paid for.

The Pentagon doesn't scrimp on the Navy either. Over the years, we built 69 battleships, even though battleships never did much except get sunk. The last one cost $3 billion. The good news is the Navy no longer uses battleships.

These are mothballed now, just rusting away. We have nuclear submarines for sneaking up on enemies under water. One nuclear submarine costs $1.6 billion. We have 50.

DIVE. DIVE. They don't dive in sand.

The Army has 8,000 Abrams tanks. How effective was one of these $3 million vehicles in Baghdad?

We captured prisoners and couldn't question them because no one spoke their language. With what we paid for one tank, we could have taught several hundred people to speak Arabic.

The most effective weapon we have in war is still that poor dogface crawling forward on his stomach with a rifle in his hand. The Pentagon might consider spending more money on our soldiers and on better intelligence, and less on billion-dollar weapons that are as out of date as the bow and arrow.

The costs of the War on Terror are often contested, as academics and critics of the component wars (including the Iraq War) have unearthed many hidden costs not represented in official estimates. The most recent major report on these costs come from Brown University in the form of the Costs of War project, which said the total for wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan is at least $3.2-4 trillion.[1] The report disavowed previous estimates of the Iraq War's cost as being under $1 trillion, saying the Department of Defense's direct spending on Iraq totaled at least $757.8 billion, but also highlighting the complementary costs at home, such as interest paid on the funds borrowed to finance the wars and a potential nearly $1 trillion in extra spending to care for veterans returning from combat through 2050.[2]

All told, the war that began in October 2001 has cost taxpayers more than an estimated $443 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service, and the lives of more than 1,523 U.S. military service members.