I would guess that about 99 percent-plus of our long suffering taxpayers want to see their Guam tax refund checks arrive in the mail and have no desire to hear any of the details about what it takes to make that happen.
Unfortunately, those checks aren’t produced by a magical process and increasingly, we have to look to Washington D.C. and its actions on the deficit and hence, the Guam military buildup, for clues as to whether those who issue bonds in New York will be able to sell the bonds to make our rebate program happen.
If the buildup doesn’t proceed more or less as originally planned, it will blow a gigantic hole in the assumption by our planners and policy makers that the buildup will inject tens of millions of dollars annually in revenue to our economy through its lifetime. That money is what underpins the financing of such things as bonds to pay your overdue tax rebates, and that is why Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, M.D., is giving us migraine headaches down on Hesler Street.
Senator Coburn’s “Back to Black” plan is part of his ambitious effort to see $9 trillion cut from the federal budget over 10 years. More immediately, Senator Coburn says, “One of the military deployments to cancel that makes the most strategic sense is the military deployment to Guam.” He breezily dismisses years of strategic and military planning that have gone into the buildup and figures — ship the Marines back to the states where they could be maintained “at a far lower cost.”
The foregoing tells me that this legislator and perhaps many of his colleagues have a lot to learn about how our present-day world came to exist. As I told Senator Coburn in a letter, the people of the United States abandoned the isolationism that his proposal to withdraw most troops from Asia and Europe represents, after hard lessons learned in World War II.
“Your proposal, Dr. Coburn, to pull half of our Marines off Okinawa and relocate them back to the U.S. mainland, flies in the face of this bitter lesson that I had hoped our nation had learned once and for all. … In my work on the Marine relocation, I never dreamed that I would have to defend having a strong military presence in Asia and the Pacific.”
In the 1920s, after the horrors of World War I, Americans tried to withdraw from the rest of the world. One consequence of this was that Guam was seized and occupied by military force at the beginning of World War II, a development anticipated by Washington but never communicated to the non-military population of the island.
I don’t know the source or extent of Senator Coburn’s military expertise, but here in the middle of Asia, the growing power of mainland China is undeniable. Flash points abound, particularly the Taiwan Straits and the Spratly Islands. Nuclear tipped ballistic missiles in North Korea are within easy range of our shores, though not yet, we hope, Oklahoma.
“If we pull back from Asia and the Pacific as you propose,” I told Senator Coburn, “the cap will be off the bottle and the scorpions will run amok.
And, this time, it will be even more costly to the American treasury and lives to put the lid back on. The world relies on us to keep the troubles from escalating into open conflict.”
Will Senator Coburn’s position prevail? I don’t know, but rather than falling back on our usual finger-pointing and blame game on the refund bond issue, we should remember that there are a lot more factors driving this debate than seen at the governor’s office or on the floor of the Legislature. The security of Americans and American interests are certainly at the top of the list.
SEN. JUDITH P. GUTHERTZ
31st Guam Legislature
