Joel Mathis

I've poked fun at conservative defense writer Max Boot lately because of Boot's recent assertions that cutting defense spending would end up cutting American jobs in a soft economy. I noted that Boot sounded like liberal columnist Paul Krugman, and suggested that "mainstream conservative Republicans—whatever their fiscal rhetoric—have long favored the soft socialism of big defense spending." Krugman sounds the same theme this morning , not mentioning Boot specifically, but otherwise making the same point. He calls this crowd "weaponized Keynesians," a term borrowed from Barney Frank. First things first: Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this conclusion, but economics isn’t a morality play: spending on things you don’t like is still spending, and more spending would create more jobs.

I noted recently that conservative hawk Max Boot was starting to sound like Paul Krugman.  Today, he again makes the economic case for leaving the military budget untouched: If the Pentagon is forced to slash a trillion dollars during the next decade—which would amount to an 18 percent reduction from the Obama budget projections released earlier this year—the Committee staff projects the total size of the Army and Marine Corps could fall from 771,400 personnel today to just 571,000, a 25 percent reduction that would make it impossible to respond to a range of different contingencies around the world . Some 200,000 soldiers and Marines who signed up to serve their country will be fired—and many of them will be hard put to find work at a time when the national unemployment rate is over 9 percent and the unemployment rate for young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is believed to be over 20 percent. (For wounded veterans the rate is said to be over 40 percent.) We would not only be breaking

Via Paul Krugman , a graphical representation of how the two Bush tax cuts, the Iraq War and the new health reform law impact the federal budget: Stuff like this is why it's so hard for me not to think of the Tea Partiers as, essentially, sore losers .