How Obamacare & Woodrow Wilson Affect Defense

Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel announced major military cutbacks to reduce troops levels to pre-World War Two size. This in turn will effect a huge cost savings with personnel cuts (people & pensions) and support equipment. But of course, the safety and well-being of the United States will not be affected at all. It should resemble the same type of outcome as that Toreador with el Toro during the bull fight where a bass singer gets quite a lift to become a soprano. ...Ole'!

Believe it not, we can cut our troop strength and still keep our strong defense too. It's something like, "You can get Obamacare and still keep your own doctor too.", even though that got four Pinocchios in the Washington Post and was finally deemed a lie by everyone in the world.

So people, where do you find yourself again? Looking backward and thinking about who was elected as a totally inexperienced, college student-radical activist who joined a small litigation firm with deep Chicago political connections ending up as a junior associate drafting legal motions with a little trial work in courts, then was a community organizer who was elected a Illinois state senator and then a U.S. Senator that had an unremarkable career who mostly voted "present" rather than take on issues to later become the 'Commander-in-Chief' of the world's largest military force in history. When Obama says he never supported the Iraq War from the beginning, he didn't with a senate vote because he was an Illinois State Senator and wasn't a U.S. Senator until January 3, 2005 to be able to vote on it and we were already at war with Iraq since March 20, 2003. 

Obama is using the same play-book that Progressive, Liberal, Democrat President Woodrow Wilson pulled out during his terms in office about military deployment and troop levels. AtPresident Woodrow Wilson the beginning of our entry into World War One, on April 2, 1917, our country had fewer troops than any major nation. Wilson had kept a physical lock on the military in his first term while he was pushing through all of his progressive democrat domestic policies and programs. Wilson's second term winning campaign chant was, "He kept us out of War!," referring to his avoiding open conflict with Germany or Mexico while maintaining his firm national policy. Although concurrently, Germany's u-boats had torpedoed unarmed civilian ships and when they sunk the passenger ship, Lusitania, it provoked an irresistible emotional political appeal to enter America into WW1 against the central powers (German, Austrian & Ottoman empires). It became the impassioned American war cry to "Remember the Lusitania!"

The call of "To the victors goes the spoils!" was irresistible to Wilson as England and France stood to plunder millions in gold from the German Republic Treasury, which was one item on Wilson's ulterior agenda to get into the end fray of the European conflict to reap those riches coming from the WW1 retribution as well as Wilson's disgust for German domestic U.S. epinionage. Wilson was unable,WW1 U.S. Anti-Spy Poster however, to offer the European allies much immediate help in the form of troops since the U.S. Army was only able to muster about 100,000 men at the time of American entrance into the war. To remedy this, Wilson immediately adopted a policy of conscription.

By the time the war stopped eighteen months later, on November 11, 1918, more than 2 million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives, mostly during hastily drawn raw recruit training exercises U.S. state-side and then with the inexperienced U.S. soldiers manning 'mustard-gas' filled trenches of European allied field combat positions. Ironically, the abrupt end was also due to the 1918 'Spanish Flu' which the Allied and Axis powers did not, for strategic reasons, admit to having the disease. That terrible pandemic killed between 50 and 100 million, 3% to 5% world-wide, more than died in WW1.

For Wilson, WW1 ended with miserable results with many of our young boys' whoWW1 Unmarked U.S. Soldiers Graves in Europe lost lives and then the costly loss of equipment and provisions in transit received after WW1 ended only to be abandoned. Wilson was not a war strategist or tactician, he was an ordered intellectual snob who liked to check off enumerated prioritized to-do lists as an erudite Princeton College President and Professor--Obama certainly emulates President Wilson himself. Obama's end-game in our Iraq and Afghanistan wars certainly looks like they resemble how Wilson drew down troops at the end of the WW1 with an Armistice, a truce, where the fighting was stopped, no one won that war. In Obama's case, the U.S. troops will stop fighting and be drawn down and exit while the al Qaeda and Taliban will continue fighting after we leave with no end in sight to ever stop war with the 'Great Satan', the United States.

Our current overall budget woes are not about the tremendous military spending or overruns of the 'discretionary spending' that congress fights budgets over; instead, it is the 'mandatory or non-discretionary spending' that is problematic debt.

So, as of 2011, our 'overall discretionary spending' is 30%, which can be argued back and forth within the colorful political debates on the floor of Congress. However, our 'total mandatory spending' is 70%, mandated by law, in which 40% are Medicare and Social Security entitlements while 20% are apportioned for Departments of Defense, Veteran's Affairs, Education and agriculture and 10% for SNAP - Food stamps and Medicaid. It is not a negotiable budget like a discretionary expense and is extremely volatile to political pressures from various special interest lobbyist groups in Washington, DC. This is where the House and Senate must work out a 'balanced budget' under our Constitutional Laws - one that both sides can finally agree upon.

The Wild Card:  Affordable Health Care Act - Obamacare is not a funded entitlement program like Medicare. Under penalty of IRS law: It is taxed and paid annually by all citizens under 65 years old for funding comprehensive health insurance coverage for all patients.

Warning: If the Affordable Health Care Act tax payments fail to fund the entire program, then all congressional budgets are worthless.

Remember: This debt reduction and spending budget debate is generational.

• Older people look to their immediate retirement savings and healthcare programs.
• Younger people look at their future for savings accounts, investments, health insurance and retirement accounts planning ahead.

Recommendation: It's time to elect a majority of Republicans in the Senate and the House in 2014 ...and for the President not working across the Congressional aisles: In the Executive branch - it's time for a change in 2016 too!