President Obama has signed an executive order creating the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform and named his selections to co-chair the body, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles.  The pair have already started making the rounds of the media, and I caught their interview with Judy Woodruff on Thursday's PBS Newshour.  It was a truly illuminating discussion.

You see, Simpson and Bowles made it clear that everything was "on the table" when it comes to fixing the country's budget deficit crisis, pointedly specifying taxes and entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.  I listened carefully for Ms Woodruff to catch them on their failure to put military spending on the proverbial table, but she never brought it up either.

Our country's military spending is just about equal to that of the whole rest of the world combined and nine times higher than China, who comes in second.  Together with our military allies, whose combined spending is close to half our own, we outspend the rest of the world by a factor of about three-to-one, and some of those countries aren't even our enemies yet!  It just seemed common sense to me that there must be some room for savings in that part of the national budget.

Now I know that these Washington insiders are a whole lot smarter than I am, and that includes media stars like Judy Woodruff, because otherwise why would we pay them so much money to tell us what to think?  So after turning the question over in my mind for a couple of days, I finally realized what should have been obvious to me from the start -- military spending doesn't have any effect on our budget deficits!

After all, the plan to rebalance the budget that President Obama announced in his State of the Union address is targeted at non-defense discretionary spending.  He's a really intelligent guy with access to information that the rest of us don't have, so if he's sure the budget can be balanced without touching military spending, that's good enough for me.  And remember when Dick Cheney -- excuse me, George Bush II -- was president?  He kept all the costs of our land wars in Asia off-budget, which meant they didn't raise our deficits at all!

 See, it's like they say in those credit card commercials:

Unfunded drug benefit with no cost controls, $1.2 trillion dollars

Tax giveaway to the ultra-rich, $2.48 trillion dollars

Worldwide defense of liberty, priceless

Priceless.  That means it doesn't cost us anything!  And once you realize that military spending has no effect on the deficit, then the next step to fiscal soundness is obvious -- Congress should enact a new selective service law and draft everyone in the country into the U. S. military.  Then all government spending will be military spending, and we'll never have to worry again about balancing the national budget.

There are lots of other benefits to this plan.  Speaking as a veteran myself and a graduate of Army OCS, I know how effectively the military trains and educates its personnel.  Every child in the country could have the benefits of a first-class military school education, as well as lifelong learning opportunities in the skills most wanted by employers -- because there'll only be one employer, who'll know exactly what skills are needed!  And no more pesky teachers' unions.

Or any unions.  There'll be no need for working people to organize because everybody's pay will be set by act of Congress, and we'll all get those generous pensions.  Plus everyone will be covered by a single-provider government health care system, just like in England.  That's the system that our uniformed military and veterans enjoy already, and they give it the highest ratings of any health care option available to Americans.

There'll be no unemployment and no homelessness.  Our cities will be as clean as a line of recruits moving down the street picking up every piece of litter can make them.  And we're not talking here about make-work government jobs "repairing" and "modernizing" infrastructure.  Recruits without any productive tasks to do will be kept busy honing their marching skills, polishing their boots and cleaning their personal weapons.

Which brings up another advantage -- no more divisive politics over gun rights.  Everybody will have a gun and be a member of a well-regulated militia too, eliminating the need to resolve subtle differences and nuances of interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.

That's not the only divisive national issue that will become irrelevant.  With everyone in the military, we won't need civilian courts any more, just courts-martial, military tribunals and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  Civilian courts, activist judges and ambulance-chasing lawyers will be relics of the past.  Of course the Supreme Court is a constitutional institution, so it'll have to be kept around, but without having to review so many cases coming up from the non-existent lower courts, it'll be free to focus on the issues intended by the Founding Fathers, like choosing presidents and guaranteeing the rights of corporate citizens.

Speaking of constitutional offices, this reform will also clarify the proper relationship of the President to the rest of the citizenry.  Under the vision of the architects of our political system, the President's principal responsibility was to defend the Constitution and see that the laws were faithfully upheld.  To act as commander-in-chief of the armed forces was one of the minor duties of the office, since the founders didn't envision any standing national military at all, and the President would only assume that duty after a congressional declaration of war and only for as long as the duration of that war.  Nor would he ever be the commander-in-chief of any citizen not on active military duty.  Now that the country has entered a state of perpetual war, the role of Commander has taken precedence over all other presidential responsibilities (even that of Decider), and having the entire citizenry under his direct command will just make the job a whole lot easier.

This isn't to say that there won't be some problems once the country is converted to a military state.  For example, it wouldn't be appropriate to enlist children before they're old enough to learn how to march, to say nothing of pre-born citizens.

And something will have to be done about those gays.

But any problems are trivial compared to the advantages conferred by restoring discipline and fiscal sanity to our budget process, and the many ancillary benefits like those I've described above.  I'm sure, gentle readers, that with a little thought you'll be able to come up with even more positive aspects of this proposal.

So please contact your congressional representatives right away and urge them to put this plan into effect.  The future of American democracy depends on it.

After all, the alternative would be an honest examination of the real priorities our economy must address to be competitive against our rivals in Asia, Europe and South America who aren't burdened by the weight of a globe-spanning military empire, to force the corporate honchos of the bloated and inefficient military contracting complex to learn how to earn an honest living instead of endlessly ripping off taxpayers with sweetheart deals and phony cost estimates, to put the energy and resources of the American people to work solving the nation's problems at home.

You don't seriously think any of that's gonna happen soon, do you?