To the editor:
America already has the world’s biggest economy and the most advanced and powerful military.
No other country — including China — comes close, and reining in the Pentagon budget won’t change that.
Yet the extreme right wing leadership of Congressional Republicans are trying to increase an already bloated military budget and pay for it by taking away funding for food stamps, wiping out key parts of the federal health care law including health care for children, and slashing funding designated to reign in Wall Street.
In last summer’s deal on the debt ceiling, the House and Senate agreed to mandatory future cuts to both the military and social programs. The debt ceiling deal was a compromise, because it mandated equal cuts to military spending and domestic programs. But now Rep. Paul Ryan — the budget guru of House Republicans — and the rest of his extreme right wing GOP colleagues in Congress are trying to renege on that deal.
They are pushing a budget package that would cut $36 billion from the food stamp program by reducing benefits and tightening eligibility, $23.5 billion from Medicaid and children’s health care, $4.2 billion from hospitals that serve the poor and uninsured, and $2.8 billion from a program that helps homeowners facing foreclosures.
A recent nationwide poll conducted by Center of Public Integrity showed that “not only does the public want deep cuts, it wants those cuts to encompass spending in virtually every military domain — air power, sea power, ground forces, nuclear weapons, and missile defenses.”
Sen. Scott Brown must denounce the right wing Republican attempts to fatten up Pentagon spending at the expense of our kids, seniors and so many others who could least afford it. He must reject Ryan’s extreme approach to our national budget as a non-starter.
We cannot afford to sell out Massachusetts’ children to preserve an already bloated Pentagon budget.
ASHWIN PUROHIT
Western Avenue, Gloucester
