Aviation Week Publishes Grundman Opinion, “Defense Advice for President-Elect Trump”
Writing on the day after Donald Trump’s election, Steve Grundman writes that “it cannot be presumed the election has settled the fiscal policy issue on which the Pentagon is stuck. . . . [but that] breaking the grip of deadlock over defense spending . . . is the most important thing the new President can do for national security in his first 100 days.”
Grundman thinks that to unlock the debate over fiscal policy and defense spending, the Trump Administration first should refocus the measure of fiscal responsibility back to the original impetus for the Budget Control Act, which concerned debt as a proportion of the economy, and the importance of raising the rate of productivity growth in the economy as an antidote to a higher debt burden. Next, he recommends packaging the President-elect’s infrastructure, tax, and other “non-defense” priorities into a productivity-growth initiative that gives BCA-adherents an object of non-defense spending that substantively serves the cause of reducing the drag of debt on the economy while in turn clearing the way within the framework of the BCA to add the ~$30 billion a year above its caps that are needed to support the existing military posture.
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