NBC Politics - New defense cuts threaten bases, shipyards

Smaller defense budgets proposed by Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will cancel some made-in-America ships, airplanes and unmanned aerial vehicles and slow down the purchase of others.

That's right .... and it's because we don't need them!

Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., told Panetta that “perhaps most disturbing of all” was the fact that at a time when U.S. strategy is increasingly focusing on East Asia and the Pacific, “this budget would reduce shipbuilding by 28 percent.”

Sorry Mr. McCain ... this is NOT Vietnam, and we don't need more ships.

“It makes no sense to me -- at a time when there is an effort to create more jobs with other spending -- to cut defense spending, which gives us the ‘two-fer’ of protecting the country and protecting the industrial base, which is a whole lot of Americans working to provide us with the infrastructure we need,” Wicker said. “It is a fact, is it not, that this budget will have an adverse effect on our industrial base?”

Wasteful military spending does more harm to our economy and security than high levels of well-planned, necessary spending on education and health-care ever could.