Urge Congress to Support Defense

Not sure what your stance is on this issue, but in the case that you lean toward cutting Entitlement Programs rather than National Security programs, please fill out the templated letter to our Congressman below.  It literally takes less than fives minutes to fill out and read the pre-written letter, so if you agree with this, then exercise your right as an American to voice your opinion!

For a bit of background, Defense is almost always the first thing Congress looks to when trying to cut the budget (they’ve cut 460 billion from the Defense budget over the last ten years), presumably because the general public believes Defense does not directly affect them.  Obviously this is not true, but regardless, the currently proposed cuts would have a severe impact on the protection and security of our country, as well as over one million jobs throughout the country.  Obviously, jobs are affected either way: cut National Security, Defense jobs are affected; cut Entitlement Programs, those employed by those programs may be fired.  But I would argue that you won’t have Entitlement Programs at all if you don’t maintain a defense of the country that’s promising them to you.

The current defense budget is about 4.9 percent of GDP—the lowest ever during wartime and well below the post-war average of 5.3%.  In 1970, Defense took up almost 40 percent of the federal budget; today it makes up less than 16 percent of federal spending.

The thing that worries me most is that people talk about the defense budget as though that’s where the deficits and the debt have incurred. You could wipe out the entire defense budget and not solve the debt problem.

The first responsibility of government is to protect the American people. It’s important to have priorities and a strategy and know what you would like to do and then fund against those priorities and those strategies.

- Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld