Would we not be a more humane, more responsible country if we spent far less on arms?
Published in the April 2011 issue of the New Internationalist.
I have a proposal: Let’s double U.S. government funds devoted to promoting renewable energy. Let’s expand allocations for foreclosure prevention to help another one million Americans keep their homes. Let’s launch a $10 billion infrastructure program to repair crumbling roads and bridges. Let’s double the number of new math and science teachers that President Obama hopes to train, bringing the total to 200,000. And let’s hire back all of those police officers fired by the city of Camden, New Jersey—already among the most dangerous places in the country before budget constraints compelled it to dismiss half of its police force in December.
While we’re at it, let’s reduce the deficit by about $40 billion.
This proposition is not voodoo economics. It is taboo economics. All of these things could be accomplished by trimming U.S. military spending by just 10 percent. Some of these suggestions (teacher training, Camden cops) are trifling items by the standards of Pentagon budgeting, together accounting for less than the cost of a single Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet.
Last year, the New York Times website offered an interactive feature, through which readers could attempt to balance the budget by choosing between a variety of cost-saving measures. The exercise showed that runaway health care expenses must be controlled for the U.S. government to remain solvent in the long term. Yet, even with the troublesome burden of our private health care system, covering the projected 2015 budget shortfall was easy, provided you did two things: allowed Bush-era tax cuts to expire (including estate tax cuts for the wealthy) and opted for a selection of modest rollbacks for the military.
You can learn a lot from Americans’ attitudes about the budget, which are out of whack in several notable areas. When polled, U.S. voters consistently overestimate the amount spent on foreign aid. Most believe it’s now around a quarter of the federal budget. In a show of iron-willed (if isolationist) penny-pinching, the average survey participant proposes it should be pared down to just 10 percent of government spending.
Little do they know that, in reality, foreign aid makes up less than one percent of the U.S. budget.
In contrast, Americans wildly underestimate Pentagon spending. Only 25 percent of those in a recent Rasmussen poll thought the country should spend at least three times as much as any other nation on defense. (Forty percent thought we should spend less, with the remaining 35 percent unsure.) Yet the United States’ annual outlays on its military—around $700 billion—come to more than six times the amount paid out by arms-happy China, our nearest rival.
U.S. weapons-makers are geniuses at preventing cuts. They spread production for pricey armaments widely across Congressional districts so that lawmakers take military allocations personally, viewing them as a source of jobs for people back home. Thus, even as right-wingers spare no vitriol in attacking Obama’s stimulus spending—arguing, “If Washington wants to help the economy, the best thing it can do is get out of the way”—their “free market” convictions disappear when it comes to stemming the flow of Pentagon largesse.
This year, several freshly elected Tea Partiers broke with traditional conservatives and vowed that defense cuts should be “on the table.” Yet, for all the talk of a new regime, both Democratic and Republican budget proposals actually increase military spending. The Pentagon’s 2012 funding request is the largest since World War II. Even adjusting for inflation, it exceeds anything that Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush had the audacity to push forward.
Would we not be a more humane, more responsible country if we spent far less on arms? Even in this age of austerity, answering in the affirmative in Washington remains seriously taboo.
