Military money on chopping block in austere time

i realise that there is no comparing 9 in a literal sense) a house hold budget to the nations budget simply because a household is in the thousands and the nations is in trillions.
But the concept is the same.
In a household that is strapped for cash and in the red way over their heads can start cutting 10 bucks here and 12 bucks there etc... it adds up and they start to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Same for our government , 10 million here , 12 million there etc... We have to start some where. This takes it to a moral stand , but, when the politicians and all their pet lobbyists along with the 3 rd and 4Th generation welfare recipients etc... are compared to our vets and the reasons behind the money being spent , i don't know about you , but IMO our vets have more then earned their benefits . while I am not advocating cutting off all entitlement programs , (that would just make a bad situation 100 times worse), but it is a hard fact that there has to be some changes made and the wild a** spending spree our politicians have been on for several years added to the 3 rd and 4Th generation welfare recipients mind set some Americans seem to have , it just seems logical that there are some programs that should be at the top of the list while others shouldn't be on the list.

The fact that we were led to think that if the debt ceiling wasn't passed, Obama stated he "didn't know" if there would be enough money in the Treasury to make the August SS payments ,but yet all the foreign aid continues along with the bombing in Libya , nothing was said about welfare benefits or that those fat cats in Washington wouldn't get paid . a month or two back we were hearing that our military personal pay was threatened ,,, etc.
why is the military and grandparents being threatened , after all the SS money shouldn't be coming out of our taxes and our military are as we speak putting their lives on the line . WTF ??!!

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I understand what you're saying, and I agree that the little things add up if you get enough of them. If a family is struggling then cutting out soda from their food budget will save them a few dollars a week and those dollars will add up over time.
But cutting off funding to NPR, the arts, and foreign aid is the equivalent of saying that a family is simply not going to eat one day a week, but still have soda on the other six.

Think of the arts and foreign relations as an analogy to going out with your next door neighbors once a month for a dinner. It's a small amount of money that makes you and your neighbors happy, keeps your community strong, and doesn't cost much. Cutting it out strains your relationship with your neighbors, and makes you less happy over all.

Now think of the military as building a big stone wall all the way around your property. It might be necessary to have something to protect your property, but putting up a picket fence would have the same effect as an 8 foot stone wall, and the difference in price is enough so that you can continue to eat out once a month with your neighbors and take your kids to the movies as well.. with some left over at the end of the year so you can buy a christmas present for some child in a hospital bed as well.

Why strain your relationships with your neighbors and lessen your happiness, when by simply reducing the size and materials costs of your border fence you can keep those things and have money left over?

I don't have a problem with making some deep cuts in the military spending, And I think the 'military leaders' crying about all the maybe's and what if's , in context to the proposed cuts are just afraid that their 'gravy train' or 'easy street' is going away. I read some where that we have spent upwards to 100 billion a year for a decade on the wars . so bringing our people home would not only save us billions in cash but would make thousands of families whole again. I worked for 3 years at a job that the military supplied all our tents ,food ,showers, sleeping bags ,transportation etc... I have seen first hand the waste that goes on by some military personal , there were several times that 2 of something would have been sufficient and we were given 10 of whatever it was.
It had a huge negative effect on our economy when all those national guard reserve were shipped out to Iraq and Afghanistan , One example is , a hospital in Utah lost a very large percentage of their professional medical staff, doctors , techs, nurses when they all shipped out within the space of 18 months a few years ago. I know this because I have a niece that had a kid with medical problems and she had to change doctors and hospitals because the ones they had been using was the one that lost all the staff. When you think about it,every conceivable type of business ,lost some and in some cases like the hospital, or most of their employees from top management to maintenance .
Yes, bringing our guys home would be a good thing , in more ways then one.