You should be commended for pointing out how contracts are being awarded to defense manufacturers for billions in new equipment that our military planners in the Pentagon don’t even need or want. And you’ve certainly chosen the proper venue to expose this malpractice. The news media, owned mostly by those same defense manufacturers, would certainly have little reason to convey this information unless they had something even more devious up their sleeves.

I think it’s just horrible that 12,000 military personnel are on food stamps, the Navy is 18,000 sailors and the Air Force 2,000 pilots short after the Army has been reduced by 630,000 men since 1989 and the end of the Cold War. That our boys are having to cannibalize parts from other equipment just to keep some of it going, training exercises have been curtailed, and we’re sending warships into danger zones at reduced levels of readiness.

For example, you point out that in the last 20 years the Air Force has asked for just five of the $50 million C-130 airlifters, but influential congressmen coming from home districts where these are built have given them 262 anyway. We’ve spent $21 billion for a Civil Air Patrol weather squadron the Air Force has been trying to discard; $8.5 billion for the Gallo Center for Alcoholism Research; $4 million for the Center itself; $1.5 million for nutrition research; and another $2.5 million for the Cancer Center for Excellence and chronic fatigue syndrome. That’s all so wasteful.

With a budget of over $300 billion for defense next year, we’re spending more money than we’ve ever spent before and more than the sum total of all other industrial nations of the world combined. (see chart)

Obviously, the problem isn’t more money. It’s putting a stop to this sort of waste and allocating the money you’ve already got properly. Reading your letter, my first reaction was one of anger and hostility coupled with the desire to remind you that the sensible use of our tax money was one of the reasons we send people like you to Washington. Putting that aside, I think it would be best to try and help you with a few suggestions.

If you didn’t have money to waste, don’t you think Congress and the Administration would be forced to spend what they do get only on things that count? Well, here’s some of the ways you can accomplish that.

First of all, you could put an immediate stop to the debt laundering operation that’s been underway since 1998. Taking $230 billion of our tax money last year to reduce just one side of the national debt while adding almost an equal amount in bogus special obligation nonmarketable bonds to the trust fund side of the debt certainly doesn’t help the public. It’s the public that has to redeem these securities someday. The public makes all Treasury securities “the safest investment in the world” because we pay them off.

Saving six cents with every dollar of our Social Security and Medicare money that you throw against reducing debt that requires real money in annual interest while you simply pass out more bonds to so-called trust funds certainly doesn’t seem like a wise return or investment to me. A return of six cents on a dollar may be nice for you guys, but it doesn't help taxpayers much now does it Senator? And that's our retirement and health care money you're using so unwisely. (see: Six Cents for A Dollar)

Secondly, you could simply stop doing what you call “borrowing” our Social Security and other entitlement money. Taking $94.4 billion from Social Security alone last year to spend elsewhere is not what’s supposed to happen with entitlement money. And what would it cost you to stop doing this? Nothing.

Of course, you would have to put that money somewhere wouldn’t you? Well, how about setting up a real trust fund just like the one you have for the Thrift Savings Plan? A plan put together for yourself and two million other federal employees. Doing the same for taxpayers shouldn’t cost you more than a couple hundred in legal time and effort. And we certainly would appreciate it. We would then be relieved of the double taxation that’s involved with replacing what you steal, plus interest. (see: "Pay-It-Again, Sam" plan)

And don’t give me any of that crap about unified budgets, laws that require you to steal our money and double tax us, baby boomers, lock-boxes (real trust funds ARE lock-boxes) or how you’re wasting time and our money studying the obvious. I’ve seen your law and it’s full of holes. In the last phrase, it even states how surpluses could be spent on anything “guaranteed as to principal and interest by the United States (that’s us) just like we insure banks.

You do remember the S&L failures of the Eighties that cost us more than $400 billion, don’t you? We insured that one. So, we could also insure any investments in the stock market. It would sure be better than what we've got now with a guaranteed minus 100 percent return on our money, plus interest that puts us deeper in the hole.

And the baby-boomer hoax is nothing more than a slight, probably 7 point 6 million, population increase after WWII that did nothing more than put us back on track after births dropped more than in half during the Great Depression of the Thirties. There is no crisis looming from baby boomers that do not show up in your own decade-to-decade Census totals (see chart).

By stealing our entitlement money, you guys in Washington are the only real crisis for Social Security.

Not only could we insure hoola-hoops if we wanted, but all this talk about investing Social Security surpluses only in the stock market is ridiculous. There are simply too many other places large sums of money could also be invested. For one thing, Social Security could probably hold every single family home mortgage in the country, and your banking buddies need the competition. That’s not socialism, it’s free enterprise.

At one time, I even thought that you guys inside the Beltway could probably handle and manage such a trust fund. Given what I’ve seen, and what you, yourself, point out, I no longer believe this. The only place to set up such a trust fund is in the private sector.

If you want help in doing this, give me a call.

McCain Letter