Now that the United States' debt has reached $18 trillion, politicians and financial experts have been debating on how what will the best way to cut the federal budget and address the deficit crisis. Some argue that it has become too large and bloated in recent years, especially as the United States is no longer being challenged by any superpower as it was by Soviet Russia during the Cold War. Looking at the importance of National Security, others say cuts should come from elsewhere in the national budget. A main focus has moved to our defense budget. Since 2001, the base defense budget has soared from $287 billion to $530 billion (Plumer). Because of these numbers, our current questioning asks, are cuts to the defense budget necessary? .
Those who claim it is necessary to make cuts in the defense budget will say we can still be a superpower with the reductions. One of the most well known advocates of this idea is the highly decorated, former United States Presidential election front-runner, and current U.S. Representative, Ron Paul. In his personal statement pertaining to defense spending and foreign affairs, he claimed, "I want America to be the most strongly defended nation in the world, but I oppose our current foreign policy that stretches our troops thin across the globe so we can play world policeman" (Paul). Basically, Paul goes on to say we are spending too much on unnecessary expenditure of troops across the world. The accumulation of money from our military usage will only add up to our already skyrocketing debt levels. According to Ron Paul's statement, "Either we make the tough choices now, or we face the even tougher consequences later" (Paul). We need to cut unnecessary defense spending now before we face an unsurpassable amount of debt in our country. Looking at the big picture, the United States can still be the country with the highest amount of defense spending if they cut their budget completely in half.
