all right willy money doesn't grow on trees but the u.s. military seems to think that it does that's when the united states needs to make serious fiscal changes is it time to put the fence dollars on the chopping block. if the sure thing for us to leave spicier miles oh spicy but we sure learned a lot about their personal tastes but what about the g.o.p. presidential hopefuls have up their sleeves for the u.s. economy. is a good. question for the burn to use resignation speech for the reserve chairman mr bernanke the market now reversed. all the happy and other activists are

taking on the federal reserve and big banks today but will their voices and actions be loud enough to change the american system. evening it's tuesday june fourteenth four pm here in washington d.c. i'm lucy coughing up and you're watching our t.v. . now foreign policy may not be as exciting or easy to grasp as the latest hollywood scandal or for that matter hot button topics like abortion or gay marriage so it might sort of be understandable why this subject didn't come up with foreign policy until a full hour and forty minutes into last night's republican presidential debate but is it really understandable i mean keep in mind that u.s. forces are fighting wars in four different countries depending on how you count the economies and dumps and while everyone's talking about out of control debts and deficits it seems a very few politicians can actually agree on how to rein in spending now one

seemingly obvious area that's ripe for cuts is the us military budget after all military spending in the united states has almost doubled since two thousand and one americans represent less than five percent of the world's population but spend more on the military than any other country six times more than five hundred billion dollars more than china the second largest spender now no one not even admiral mike mullen would deny the fact that u.s. debt is a major threat to national security but where to cut and c.n.n.'s john king may have forgotten to ask the republican candidates what are the military budget is a good starting point so we hear darkie just like to step up to the plate and i can think of no better experts on defense spending than our two next guests lawrence korb is a senior fellow at the center for american progress and a senior advisor for the center of defense information and dr james carafano is a senior defense analyst with the heritage foundation gentlemen thank you so much for coming in time to see me through if you got a car phone i'd like to start with you you know the cold war is over world war two

is over the world military situation has changed we have one of the most powerful military in the world and we spent quite a bit to ensure that it stays that way what's wrong with cutting the military budget in this time. well you said there's four wars going on the united states is the world's largest economy it's called global responsibilities not so sure why defense spending problem historically the level of defense spending in percentage economy especially near historic post world war two low so much for its inappropriate certainly not the cause of our fiscal problem so we can take defense spending because we may have contributed take defense spending to zero tomorrow and thirty years the country still goes broke because so security medicare and medicaid those are the big fiscal issues that they have to grab what we could we can't balance the budget over the long term by cutting defense that's just a fact and fact of quarter four i get to you i mean i just just to respond this is often the argument to keep on hearing you know you bring up the issue of military spending and you hear back social security domestic spending these are the issues

that we really have to tackle but does it have to be an either or case i mean a few years ago yourself wrote a piece that was titled i think guns versus butter and butter is winning out but can we cut both guns and butter vote you can't you would be less safe it's just that simple i mean nobody nobody is saying we should spend money on defense just because it's fun we should spend money on defense to meet the u.s. vital national interest but i would be less safe national guard if we have not if we do it do it correctly i think secretary gates has already laid the foundation he said any secretary who recommends that in large land armies into asia the middle east or africa should have his head examined and we can see it is like well he said he should've said it but if you take a look at their projected budget right now are you going to cut back on the ground forces and i think you would adopt a different different different strategy and i think that's you know one area that you can take a look at the air war college air force as think tank it's not a study about nuclear weapons and they said three hundred eleven is all you need

for the target so you right now the start agreement to system fifty eight hundred you might consider going you know for example down to one thousand and i don't think that that would you know if you provide security we still have eighty thousand troops in europe after the end of the cold war the. it's interesting enough to say well gee they're here so we can cut our defense you know defense spending so i think you can take you know take a look you know take a look at that so there are a lot of things that you can do it if you do it smartly we've done it before dick cheney did it when he worked for the first president bush well the layered unit when he worked for richard you know richard nixon it can be done and it could be done and if you do it right you got to manage the place better and the bush administration and you know even gay so you don't have a strong deputy secretary of defense to keep weapons costs under control under control that's occurred to me as i mentioned in the interim we are fighting three to four wars as a doctor current financial and. military spending didn't cause that that problem we

have proposed cuts by the obama administration so why not just leave it at that and focus on other first of all what i'm talking about is not war funding war funding as supplemental which is the first time we've ever done that in korea and vietnam we didn't do supplements you know after the first year of the war so i'm not talking about that those need to be funded by the way the pentagon it's not a lot of things and so the supplements that were you know directly you know to the war defense didn't cause it but it contributed back into thought you know it's ten years ago bush came up with his tax cuts and second president bush he projected by two thousand and ten we would completely eliminate the debt that we didn't get nor all people in the interim anything we knew how many old people there were but if you look at what he projected for defense and you look at what we actually spent we had about two trillion dollars counting the war costs and county increasing the baseline project so it should be on the table it's not going to solve it but it needs to be on the table right now we've got a freeze on discretionary spending other than defense we need to fix our roads for

example given on our roads lately you know we need to you know our education system we're falling behind you know a lot of countries in the world so we need to you know put more money into that and not just cut those and not defense and dr we were talking about how. we're fighting these conflicts and he said that one of the reasons that we need to keep defense spending at the level that it's at is because of the present often in these wars but hasn't the lesson of osama bin laden's killing taught us that these counterinsurgency types of lots of boots on the ground programs aren't necessarily what's going to help us i mean maybe we should be focusing on these smaller troops who you know with the backing of serious intelligence gathering that could help us i mean there's the problem is that we're fighting look here's the problem and the problem with with what president obama said is we're going to cut four hundred billion dollars we'll just do less missions and the problem is the enemy gets a vote i mean the enemy gets to decide how you fight it's a great plan a strategy and say i'm just going to do this that's what i'm afraid that's how president truman with say tons of money in after the cold war we said we're just

not going to fund south korea we're just going to say if you don't need us i said we're just not going to defend south korea will save a lot of money in there what happen the north koreans have dated we want to preventing south korea defense spending went through the roof if we had maintained it out a good defense and a big to begin with maybe the north koreans were never attacked never we were never had to waste a kind of money so this notion that somehow which is kind of what larry said we came for is let's just let's have just enough defense and what we think will get the job done that's great if you have enemies that are always going to cooperate this is like this is like people that say i want insurance i want health insurance but i only want health insurance for the diseases that i'm going to go and look at big enemy that's going to attack us right now libya didn't attack us in our soil and we're appalled and let you know that's what people asked me on september tenth to the enemy that's going to tax us do you think that it's worth putting our nation in fiscal danger because it absolutely but you make the point this is not what's putting the nation of fiscal trouble it's not defense and defense spending is that near historical larry knows thirty years ago defense spending was because the

percent of the budget today it's twenty percent of the budget it's not the big ticket item it's not we're causing a problem we're spending i think a reasonable amount on defense that's not the issue we're spending a lot of money on other things people have to set priorities listen to people want better roads and they want to be less safe. it's america it's a democracy vote for that dr cronin we always hear about the percentage of the g.p.s. as it relates to military spending and as you are fond of correctly said in the sixty's during the cold war we're spending eight percent of g.d.p. on the military now it's about four percent about half that obviously we're spending less problems g.d.p. is meaningless what we do g.d.p. goes down the track goes up ok that's a measure of what you can do you can't buy perfect security back in the eisenhower administration we spent knife percent of g.d.p. on defense the marginal tax rate the highest tax rate was ninety percent you want to go back to that ok you know and if you want to spend more imagine going to have to work tax more you know a lot of folks don't want to you know they say if you increase taxes that's going to slow down the economic economic recovery or days you can look at what your

competitors do you know during the cold war we spent you know eight or nine percent the soviet union up to forty percent of their g.d.p. and that's what led to their own doing they overspent on defense if you put in constant dollars what we're spending right now it's higher than on average in the cold war and as you were you know lead in show you know we count for almost half of the world's military expenditures and so i mean this is what you gotta look at what do you competitors doing ok in a cold war the competitor was a of the super top al-qaeda it's not going to be defeated militarily going to have to win that you know by convincing people in that part of the world that their narrative is not true you go into iraq you don't do you help the al qaeda narrative so we haven't used our you know power wisely and we spend a lot of money and want to go to war in iraq why don't we raise taxes ok so people would have to feel that there wasn't so not only are we not raised that we caught and that these contribute to part of the deficit i mean the direct cost of the wars

in iraq and afghanistan which were not paid for is one point five trillion right now the indirect cost couldn't get a caring for the thousands of people wounded and mentally and physically and everything. like that kind of is going to be about six trillion dollars so what about that i mean who's the big enemy is china getting ready to invade and if china ever wanted to do something negative i mean you know nothing are the important and why do you have health insurance what's the big problem you're young you're healthy what's a problem if you look at what my health insurance was bankrupting me and it meant that i couldn't pay my bills and health insurance bankrupting you is it fifty percent how many what percentage of your income is it when it's a pretty reasonable percentage of your income compared to what you're getting for it look and that's what the fence is it's a reasonable part of our expenditures look larry says we're spending a lot more everybody else well you know what we spend a lot more than everybody on almost everything we spend more on pizza we spend on more a movie so that's what i mean ok are we not to say that you know we're ok here is that it's a meaningless statistic the united states is the world's largest economy we spend

more than most people on everything what's relevant about that what's what's important is we're wasting unsustainably have programs that we can't pay for overtime that's a problem you're right well the reason why nato is not contributing is not because nato is free riding on us it's because they've done to their economies what we're doing to ours they have unsustainable social programs and they have high tax rates and they have flat growth and that's why they can't afford this they're about you know you're talking about sustainable spending and wasteful spending let's talk about here in the united states i want to bring to it to call one program we're talking about the joint strike fighter program right after a five one trillion dollars according to the past pentagon it would cost taxpayers over the next decade to buy and maintain a fleet of f. thirty five joint strike fighters in the long term even mccain a defense hawk eye all standard said that was a job dropping number and why do we need a joint strike fighters one they sold with one trillion dollars are they stupid or are they. are they are they buying it why are they buying

a lot of. the high cost of the original code i didn't have a midlife crisis by ferrari i mean you know sometimes you know you get back to you get back to that and i think this was a good point ok yes you need new planes but navy does not run the joint strike. right it's been jammed down their throat they would prefer to buy the f. eighteen you know off which they already are already already have because of the high cost of you know maintaining it so why not let them they would get what they want and you could save some money to do other things like yeah i mean these are these are great plains indians just said look we don't want these they don't believe in god i are sixteen teams we offer an f. thirty five they buy in a heartbeat because it's the world's finest plane i mean this is ridiculous you're saying let's buy second hand equipment one of the other you do you know you need to be in an office not a second hand equip you ok tell that to the indian guy to the navy our u.s. navy wants them to see you know publicly said it's because they don't have enough money to buy real planes they would have to have a seven hundred seventy year old guy with

a ridiculous idea of their own signal that we're only going to tell you we have not only did military and some a war we sell more weapons are all right i do want to wrap this up dr han are you saying that kenya send me as an ethical reason to. know that you're going to push them in a million spent if you're going to put your men and women in harm's way and you can afford to buy them the equipment they need you should and what about if you don't like the men and women and and harm's way that is the site where what's harm's way in iraq war was a mindless needless senseless that had nothing to do with the attacks of nine eleven or the money you squandered there you could buy everything that you need and then that's the problem you do things that you should we did it in vietnam and we did it in iraq and that's where you spend the money when you should you should be very very very careful and by the way it's amazing with you know if you take there's a lot of talk about how do we profile in the cold war if nixon cuts ok and have to be eisenhower cuts and reagan building but we had

a great build up stop in eighty five when the doesn't live and we've been living off it ever since you know you have you know that army that it was on the back that that well that did live out the reagan buildup and look good luck and you know what if you don't do well there you go you know what i have been money. in the past that doesn't get us in the future if your roof fall down and you don't like the contractor it worked on your roof you still have to rebuild your room i agree with everything or military for the future and we can't live on a ring of military because that's not what is up there where you get only we don't know you may not be able to do whatever you can military we may not be able really under very busy day for it's as well for twenty five when i'm virtually as we are out of time a very exciting discussion i think we're going to need to have you back for the for half hour next time thank you so much that was dr lawrence korb with the center for american progress and dr james carafano with the heritage foundation. now the defense budget may not have been at the top of the agenda at yesterday's presidential debate but that doesn't mean that the candidates got off easy and keep in mind it was a recent c.n.n. poll that showed that forty eight percent of americans believe another great

depression may have been next year so what kind of hard hitting questions did c.n.n. posed to the candidates let's take a look. elvis or johnny cash oh that's really tom coke or pepsi or coke leno or conan i'm probably leno blackberry or i phone blackberry blackberry it is a deep dish for thin crust. so if you're mild oh spicy dancing with the stores or american idol american idol maybe we'll have to have an american idol contest. i'm sorry. unemployment just going up to nine point per cent half of all unemployed americans have been out of work for at least six months forty four million americans are in food stamps and their home sales dropped six point three trillion that's look at pete dollar since the housing crisis began and the fed is printing dollars not going to paper and we're asking the next president of the united states about pizza really something that is black hair but thankfully i know just the man

to set it straight gerald celente is the director of the trends research institute and the publisher of the trends journal he's with us from new york thank you so much for being here mr salon say now did you hear a single idea from from the you can't candidates during the two hour debate last night that made you feel like you know maybe it will be ok if one of these that's when the office not really to me the only one that has any credibility to all is ron paul and i'm a political atheist i don't take sides on this and that is that he's the only one saw a thing about bringing home the troops about legalizing marijuana about ending these wars on terror on drugs and other kinds of wars it's disgraceful c.n.n. the you know it's a cartoon news network only somebody with a child longing with such a law and loose questions it's the presidential reality show we just sort of law i

none of these candidates again with the exception of paul is indistinguishable from the other so it's quite this crazy. well what went on in new hampshire and what the cost to news network calls the debates although i have chris i don't know if it would be necessarily any better than any other network that we're talking about care but you mentioned one of the things one of the points that ron paul brought up which is ending the military conflict at this country's involved with it and there are many of them are talking about afghanistan we're talking about iraq there's a covert wars in yemen there's a pakistan and libya of course and one of the interesting developments that we saw last night was the u.s. congress voted to cut off funding for efforts in libya all of this just as a plurality of americans finally say that out you know they don't think that it's worth for the united states to keep on getting militarily involved in libya there so if you have congress seemingly onboard the american people on board what are the chances that are going to end that war probably slim and none they're going to keep

it going at some extent we believe we're not going to see it and come very soon because that has to go to the senate and oh and you could never tell whether it's going to be a false leg or something real that will rile the american people let's not forget how quickly sentiments changed against obama so for obama when the osama of births obama at the sewed broke back in on may first and how the nation rallied behind him and by the way i want to take exception about what about c.n.n. to ask such childish questions at a time when i get every day i get letters from people they're losing everything people have a job for thirty five years have no work at all they're losing their homes people our soldiers be getting killed the wars are draining the treasury and a little clown asks what do you like. deep dish what did you cross

leno or conan come on you know with but as i said this is the right presidential reality show america's gone from sinatra to snooki stupid but it's really indicative of where the country is heading and that's the importance of last night's debate where the country having mr cilento as going to get worse it's heading down that anybody that would leave that the same brilliant minds that created all of these problems whether they're military problems economic problems are now going to miraculously pull us out of this well they're out of their minds because the losers in the incompetence are in the right house it's the beltway incompetence they're not going to fix these problems and were warning people what's going on around the world whether it's in the european monetary union they're not going to fix the greek problem they're not going to fix the portugal problem

they're not going to fix the problems in spain and ireland italy coming up u.k. is already in one how are they going to fix the problems oh i have an idea you have a second mortgage take out a third take out new debt on top of all day that's the only thing they could come up with so we're going through the great collapse the world markets are seeing it even even now the guys that the. good the round table the business roundtable are quote less optimistic than before priscilla you've been doing this for a long time and you've been making these predictions a lot of them have panned out and unfortunately every time you say something like this people say you know what you're doman gloom or you're pessimist you're in alarm mist why is it that we're not hearing these these ideas elsewhere why aren't we hearing us on our mainstream media channels and from the politicians we elect into office you're not hearing it on the business news. that works because you have

the wall street barkers out there selling you their line of goods and how about a credit default swap you know you look just like the kind of woman that needs a synthetic collateralized debt obligation. so there are always hawking something it's a big ponzi scheme and i'm not saying this in generalities do you realize that they only there's always it's always time to buy and on the one point five percent if they ever say it's a selling opportunity it's always the thawing opportunity they need to keep the ponzi scheme going and they don't like guys like me that say don't eat the corporate kool-aid and don't thought of the political junkie and who's they who say is that the anchors of the politicians is it was only it is it's it's the corporate media look i know a lot of these people the corporate media we have dinner weeks log and they say how

fortunate i am because i'm not the holding to anyone they have that paycheck that they have to worry about so they have to watch what they say they go off you or add a line they get the call from the top or from somebody out in the political field that doesn't like them so asking about this guy or that boy or girl and this is going to before we run out of time you got me pretty upset here i'm pretty depressed after the segment if the republicans don't have it right if obama doesn't have it right if no one has that right is there any sort of hope for some sort of positive development i mean how do we get out it's not so we have to get out of the you know the messes take it take a cue from iceland tiny little iceland i guess that's the only country left with by now they had referendum in italy a referendum let the people vote on these issues but politicians don't represent the us they only little kids believe that the politicians represent the people

that's just the most money into their people it's in the bronx we call it drives and payoffs in the white shoe boy language they call it campaign contributions and this doesn't she have to vote it's a slant if you ever run for office i hope that you are a lot of snow first thank you so much i was very little and said the director of the trends research institute. well governments want multinational corporations and global institutions all seem to be losing the battle against computer hackers with the us senate yesterday joining the likes of the i.m.f. sony and google on a global growing list of hacking victims but also growing it would seem to the so-called hacktivists for example the anonymous collective who say that they're just trying to hold corrupt politicians and firms accountable now in their latest campaign which we talked a little bit about yesterday dubbed operation empire state rebellion anonymous set its sights on fed chairman ben bernanke and they want him to step down over what they say are economic crimes against the american people well one reporter who's

been hot on the hackers trail is courtney comstock of the business insider and she's joining us now from new york city thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us so you know anonymous gave ninety days to resign or else and i may have missed the announcement since i've been sitting here in studio during the day but it seems that he hasn't exactly stepped aside so what now work we expect from operation empire state rebellion you know we were supposed to be expecting some protests today and there were supposed to be protests and new york city and across the country on flag day which is today and apparently you guys sent a reporter down there with a video camera and only four people showed up so we were expecting big protests what ended up happening is i think there may be behind our computers not quite oh no well that's and you can see right now but our viewers are watching the fascinating footage of the for folks out there on the street but at the same time wish at the same time you yourself have reported there has been

a increase in certainly the number of cyber attacks around the globe we saw just this week headlines that the international monetary fund was breached do you have any sense maybe it is more than just fear mongering maybe there is something behind this sort of trend. well it does worry me even talking about them makes me a little wary i just don't want them to come after you or anybody you know i just i worry about hackers absolutely i think that cyber security is something that's we really need to be wary of i know that citi group recently was hacked and they just announced that it was took like one simple little computer track to be able to do it so it seems like kind of just we did say preliminary measures to protect against these hackers because the ad is a serious threat and they're getting and so i am going to target the fed i mean and what happened with the i.m.f. because it seems like there's conflicting reports about it we know that anonymous

has threatened the i.m.f. at the same time the actual hack would took place way before the so many incidents so do we have any sense of what was taken what actually went on with the i.m.f. well we know that e-mails and documents were taken from the i.m.f. what those e-mails and documents were we don't know and i and that says that sorry somebody from somebody familiar with the situation says that if a foreign government hacks i have asked but anonymous did threaten so who knows maybe they made it look like they're foreign government not sure of their capabilities but it seems like they can do a lot so it does raise the issue of the fact that cyber security is really difficult thing to pinpoint and to trace down and you know one interesting thing that we found in a story that will decline in the next hour is one of our reporters went out to the streets of new york and try to ask folks where they think that hackers are heroes or villains and she had a really difficult time finding folks who would say that they're the bad guys and at a time when we're seeing more and more security measures more silencing of the press

and information could be that maybe these guys are on to something and there are best hope in terms of correcting corruption. i don't know if there are best hopes but they are certainly an underground group of angry people that have a point on something and i think you know citizens being able to speak their minds is certainly a good segue and if they feel like they're not being listened to maybe that now maybe they will maybe will listen to them maybe their government will will hear them out and hear their points and that's all we can hope for that's the best outcome anyway as well and it certainly seems like sometimes we're not exactly being listened to by a government so who knows maybe they are on to something but very briefly there was another report in the guardian i believe it was a guardian newspaper last week that said one in four hackers are actually f.b.i. informants so maybe do you these folks so we're afraid of are actually our own our

own people here could i be you know that's interesting because i know that in order to be in the group anonymous it's pretty much like i could be an anonymous if i had any idea or how to hack but you just have to join a chat group and be able to do some basic things so i believe that and you know i hope they get to the bottom of it all right well courtney i hope that you really are the the editor of business insider and not an anonymous mole but will do some investigation and thank you so much for take the time to speak with us thank you lafave guy all right well that is a for now unfortunately but for more on the stories that we've covered this what are t dot com slash usa and of the ways you can check out our u two pages you tube dot com slash or to america please call me on twitter at lucy casanova for a post of stories that the mainstream media is not covering but you should be reading about i hope to see you right back here in half an hour.