Mar 27, 2015 4 min read

Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad as compiled by the Associated Press:

The list of needed renovations and repairs on West Virginia’s college campuses is growing and likely to get longer.

The state is simply not providing public four-year colleges with enough funding to maintain their aging campuses, according to a consultant’s report to the Higher Education Policy Commission.

The Connecticut-based Sightlines education-facilities advisement group assigned a “renovation age” to each campus it studies, weighting the age of its buildings with remodeling and maintenance that has been done. As a whole, the West Virginia system is the second “oldest” in terms of facilities of the nine systems in its “peer” group used in the study.

The state provided what the consultants called sporadic and often one-time funding, and something more consistent is needed.

These infrastructure costs are just another reminder the state’s declining support of higher education is taking us in the wrong direction. The legislature cut spending almost every year since 2008; meanwhile, tuition and fees continue to rise.

Congress generally has little trouble achieving broad agreement on defense spending. One reason is a well-established belief that throwing more money at the Pentagon will solve the security challenges America faces. That general inclination is still there; what is not there, especially among Republicans, is agreement on how to do it this time.

The party’s defense hawks seem perfectly willing to tap into an emergency war fund originally set up to underwrite American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The party’s fiscal conservatives see this as a betrayal of agreed-upon budget targets.

In a 2011 deficit showdown, President Obama and Congressional Republicans agreed to severe budget cuts totaling $1.2 trillion over 10 years that would apply to both domestic and defense programs.

This Congress seems content to leave undisturbed the mandated cuts for domestic programs, many of which affect the poor and middle class, but Republicans as well as some Democrats are now seeking a hefty increase of as much as $100 billion in Pentagon spending. The question is whether to do it honestly or not: whether to engage in a straightforward exercise that would require honestly confronting the 2011 budget agreement; or whether to pump more money into the Pentagon’s Overseas Contingency Operations account. This would represent a further corruption of an account created to underwrite the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but has since been used for purposes unrelated to these conflicts.

The nation’s security needs are not static. Yet, those who argue for funneling billions more to the Pentagon stand on very shaky ground when billions of dollars have been squandered, when billions more have been lost to waste and corruption in Afghanistan, and when the budget proposals from both Obama and Congress waste billions more on an overgrown nuclear arsenal.

Britain’s recently announced budget displayed the fruits of its government’s fiscal conservatism. The recovery is strong. Now will come a debate about spending priorities. A significant body of opinion argues defense should be a major area of interest for the next government.

The lesson of previous conflicts is not that a country can spend less by preparing for the variety of limited warfare, but it has to be prepared for anything and everything. It has, however, made certain security commitments, and some Conservative members of Parliament argue this means sticking to the NATO ambition of spending at least 2 per cent of the gross domestic product on defense.

The Western alliance has to honor its obligations and Britain’s political leaders should make an unequivocal commitment to meeting the 2 per cent target. The price for upholding freedom is one worth paying.