America Has ‘Reached The Point Of No Return,’ Reagan Budget Director Warns

By Nathan Diebenow

January 11, 2011 "Rawstory" -- The Obama administration's $78 billion cut to US defense spending is a mere "pin-prick" to a behemoth military-industrial complex that must drastically shrink for the good of the republic, a former Reagan administration budget director recently told Raw Story.

"It amounts to a failed opportunity to recognize that we are now at a historical inflection point at which the time has arrived for a classic post-war demobilization of the entire military establishment," David Stockman said in an exclusive interview.

"The Cold War is long over," he continued. "The wars of occupation are almost over and were complete failures -- Afghanistan and Iraq. The American empire is done. There are no real seriously armed enemies left in the world that can possibly justify an $800 billion national defense and security establishment, including Homeland Security."

Short of that, he suggested, the United States has "reached the point of no return" with its artificial creation of wealth, and will eventually face a sharp economic decline.

Stockman last fall criticized the extension of the Bush tax cuts while the federal government continued to borrow money abroad to pay for its public welfare and warfare programs. His solution to deficit spending -- a huge across-the-board tax increase -- is contrary to the current anti-tax ideology shared among tea party activists as well as fiscal conservatives in the Republican Party.

Stockman, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to run the Office of Management and Budget, offered two models for the US military's compulsory demobilization: the one after World War I in 1920 and the one after World War II in 1946.

Calling today's military spending running at 5.4 percent of GDP "simply an absurd level that begs for radical contraction and surgery," he said that a "reasonable target" to shrink the defense establishment would be 3 percent of GDP by 2015.

Read the rest here.