Reply #12: Kerry wants star wars and mini-nukes cut out completely. [View All]

[blm]

He has voted for cutting unnecessary programs many times as Senator. In fact, the GOP was going to use these votes to say he's soft on defense.

Posted at P&C:

http://www.gop.com/newsroom/rncresearch/research071803.htm
http://www.gop.com/newsroom/rncresearch/research071603.htm

Kerry believes in funding programs that work, but he is a strong believer in eliminating redundacy, useless pork giveaways, and stuff that just plain doesn't work. He's also a big proponent of reducing, not increasing the nuclear weapons in the world - starting with the US.

Kerry is strong on Defense, but his priorities are fully backing (and paying) military personnel and giving veterans their rightful due, not bending over for the Military-Industrial Complex.
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"We must also take a hard look at federal spending. We simply can’t afford to keep wasting money on the wrong things.

It won’t be easy. The special interests will stop at nothing to keep their special deals. That’s why I’ve joined John McCain in calling for a “Corporate Subsidy Reform Commission” modeled after the military base-closing commission. A bipartisan group would recommend corporate subsidies to be eliminated and Congress would have to vote up or down on the entire package.

It’s the only way to stop the games that go on in Washington. When I first came to the Senate, each year millions upon millions of dollars were lavished on a wool and mohair subsidy cooked up during WWI to make sure we’d have plenty of wool and mohair for our soldiers’ uniforms.

But even after we stopped making our uniforms out of wool and mohair, the subsidy continued. I came to the Senate floor again and again - finally we killed it. Or we thought we did. Last year it came back. This kind of wasteful, no-growth, special interest giveaway is alive and well -- again. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We were presented a defense bill that gave away $250,000 to an Illinois firm to research caffeinated chewing gum; $750,000 for grasshopper research in Alaska; $250,000 for a lettuce geneticist in Salinas, California and $64,000 for urban pest research in Georgia. This is our defense budget?"

http://www.johnkerry.com/news/speeches/spc_2002_1203.html