Congress is slashing food stamps, student loans and heating assistance

from DailyKos
Finally, while Congress is slashing food stamps, student loans and heating assistance to save money (the Bridge to Nowhere remains intact, thank god), Molly Ivins looks elsewhere and comes up with 60 pain-free billion dollars:

Just for starters, is there anyone---anyone---who thinks we need more than 1,000 nuclear warheads in order to have a credible nuclear deterrent at this time? By cutting back to 1,000, we can save $13 billion right there.

Another $26 billion would be saved by scaling back or stopping the research, development and construction of weapons that are useless to deal with modern threats. Many of the weapons involved, like the F/A-22 fighter jet and the Virginia Class submarine, were designed to fight the defunct Soviet Union. All of this is according to Lawrence Korb, whose credentials are endless---senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information, former vice president of Raytheon, etc. The $26 billion does not include the old Star Wars program, now called missile defense, which could be cut back to basic research for a savings of $7 billion.

I'm trying to give you some sense of scale here. According to Korb's research, we could take $60 billion out of the defense budget, 15 percent of the total, without remotely affecting military readiness.

Amazing---she didn't even break a sweat.