C-SPAN Selected Clip
Clip Created Oct 22, 2012

What levels of military spending are appropriate in a weak economy?

Clipped from: Presidential Candidates Debate
Oct 22, 2012

Questions from Presidential Debate at Lynn University

Deficit Budget Military Defense Department Navy

6 minutes, 0 seconds | 183 views



00:00:02

The good news is -- I’ll be happy to have you take a look. Come on our website; you’ll look at how we get to a balanced budget within 8 to 10 years. We do it by getting -- by reducing spending in a whole series of programs. By the way, number one I get rid of is Obamacare. There are a number of things that sound good, but, frankly, we just can’t afford them, and that one doesn’t sound good and it’s not affordable. So I get rid of that one from day one. To the extent humanly possible, we get that out. We take program after program that we don’t absolutely have to have and we get rid of them.

00:00:31

Number two, we take some programs that we are going to keep, like Medicaid, which is a program for the poor -- we take that health care program for the poor and we give it to the states to run because states run these programs more efficiently. As a governor, I thought, please, give me this program. I can run this more efficiently than the federal government.

00:00:48

Can he do that?

00:00:49

And states, by the way, are proving it. States like Arizona, Rhode Island have taken these Medicaid dollars, have shown they can run these programs more cost-effectively. And so I want to do those two things. It gets us to a balanced budget within 8 to 10 years.

00:01:06

Bob --

00:01:07

Let --

00:01:08

Let’s get back to the military, though.

00:01:09

Well, that’s what I’m trying to find out about.

00:01:11

He should have answered the first question.

00:01:14

Look, Governor Romney has called for $5 trillion of tax cuts that he says he’s going to pay for by closing deductions. Now, the math doesn’t work, but he continues to claim that he’s going to do it. He then wants to spend another $2 trillion on military spending that our military is not asking for.

00:01:34

Now, keep in mind that our military spending has gone up every single year that I’ve been in office. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined -- China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, you name it -- next 10. And what I did was work with our Joint Chiefs of Staff to think about what are we going to need in the future to make sure that we are safe, and that’s the budget that we’ve put forward.

00:02:02

But what you can’t do is spend $2 trillion in additional military spending that the military is not asking for; $5 trillion on tax cuts. You say that you’re going to pay for it by closing loopholes and deductions without naming what those loopholes and deductions are, and then somehow you’re also going to deal with the deficit that we’ve already got. The math simply doesn’t work.

00:02:28

But when it comes to our military, what we have to think about is not just budgets. We’ve got think about capabilities. We need to be thinking about cybersecurity. We need to be thinking about space. That's exactly what our budget does, but it’s driven by strategy. It’s not driven by politics. It’s not driven by members of Congress and what they would like to see. It’s driven by what are we going to need to keep the American people safe. That's exactly what our budget does.

00:02:56

And it also then allows us to reduce our deficit, which is a significant national security concern, because we’ve got to make sure that our economy is strong at home so that we can project military power overseas.

00:03:10

Bob, I’m pleased that I’ve balanced budgets. I was in the world of business for 25 years. You didn't balance your budget, you went out of business. I went to the Olympics that was out of balance, and we got it on balance and made a success there. I had the chance to be governor of our state; four years in a row, Democrats and Republicans came together to balance the budget. We cut taxes 19 times, balanced our budget.

00:03:34

The President hasn’t balanced a budget yet. I expect to have the opportunity to do so myself. I’m going to be able to balance the budget.

00:03:40

Let’s talk about military spending, and that's this -- our Navy --

00:03:43

Thirty seconds.

00:03:44

Our Navy is old -- excuse me, our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission; we’re now down to 285. We’re headed down to the low 200s if we go through with sequestration. That's unacceptable to me. I want to make sure that we have the ships that are required by our Navy.

00:04:02

Our Air Force is older and smaller than any time since it was founded in 1947. We’ve changed for the first time since FDR -- since FDR, we had the -- we’ve always had the strategy of saying we could fight in two conflicts at once. Now we’re changing to one conflict.

00:04:19

Look, this, in my view, is the highest responsibility of the President of the United States, which is to maintain the safety of the American people. And I will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is the combination of the budget cuts the President has, as well as the sequestration cuts. That, in my view, is making our future less certain and less secure --

00:04:39

Bob, I just need to comment on this. First of all, the sequester is not something that I proposed. It’s something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen. The budget that we’re talking about is not reducing our military spending, it’s maintaining it.

00:04:51

But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military has changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship where we’re counting ships; it’s what are our capabilities.

00:05:22

And so when I sit down with the Secretary of the Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we determine how are we going to be best able to meet all of our defense needs in a way that also keeps faith with our troops, that also makes sure that our veterans have the kind of support that they need when they come home. And that is not reflected in the kind of budget that you’re putting forward, because it just doesn’t work. And we visited the website quite a bit and it still doesn’t work.

00:05:54

A lot to cover. I’d like to move to the next segment: Red lines -- Israel and Iran. Would either of you -- and you’ll have two minutes -- and, President Obama, you have the first go at this one. Would either of you be willing to declare that an attack on Israel is an attack on the United States -- which, of course, is the same promise that we give to our close allies like Japan. And if you made such a declaration, would not that deter Iran? It’s certainly deterred the Soviet Union for a long, long time when we made that promise to our allies.