By lex, on June 29th, 2011
During his speech today outlining the country’s debt crisis, President Obama singled out the military for spending cuts while excoriating hedge fund managers and “corporate jet owners” for tax increases (despite having approved stimulus tax breaks for corporate jet owners only two years ago). In fact, the words “corporate jet owners” dripped from his lips three times, according to the merry crewe from HotAir.com.
I bet my buddies at Gulfstream and Hawker Beechcraft are just delirious with joy, right now.
I hold no particular brief for hedge fund managers, but the military – from my admittedly parochial point of view – is perhaps one of the most highly functioning elements of the federal bureaucracy, routinely exceeding the political and bureaucratic arms of the state in “customer satisfaction”. You could pull the plug on military spending entirely and make hardly a dent in our mushrooming entitlement spending accounts. And aerospace is one of our most competitive sectors in worldwide engineering, manufacturing and design, which in turn yields national defense benefits.
Taken from a certain perspective, it makes every kind of sense to punish success, and reward dependency.
It’s just not a perspective I share.
