The Washington Post (4/29/13) had an odd headline on the front page of Monday’s paper:
Defense Cuts Pose a Paradox for Left
The last word of the headline was changed to “liberals,” but the message is essentially the same: There are cuts to military spending, due to the sequester and the winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that drop in spending slows economic growth and causes job losses.
Reporter Zach Goldfarb explains the “conundrum” this way:
Liberal lawmakers and others on the left have argued for years that the military budget is bloated and should be dramatically scaled back. At the same time, they have been major advocates of government spending to help drive economic growth and create jobs.
That seems generally on the money–but those principles are not necessarily in conflict.
For starters: How big is this drop in military spending? Goldfarb writes:
As a percentage of gross domestic product, defense spending started picking up after the attacks of September 11, 2001, rising from 3.8 percent and peaking at 5.3 percent in the fall of last year.
In the first three months of this year, military spending made up only 4.8 percent of the size of the economy, and that is likely to decline more.
So as a percentage of the economy, military spending is still a percentage point higher than it was before 9/11. This is not as dramatic a shift as one might think.
The more important question is the usefulness of military spending as a form of job creation. Goldfarb touches on this when he writes:
The shrinking Pentagon budget also raises tough questions for liberals about the role of the military as a source of employment. At a time when the country is struggling to keep good-paying manufacturing jobs from going overseas, weapons systems and armored vehicles must be made in the United States, creating jobs at home.
The real issue is whether or not this a particularly effective way to create jobs. The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst compared different forms of public spending (11/28/11), and here’s what they found:
Our conclusion in assessing such relative employment impacts is straightforward: $1 billion spent on each of the domestic spending priorities will create substantially more jobs within the U.S. economy than would the same $1 billion spent on the military.
Or, for the graphically-inclined (courtesy of Think Progress):
The point is that shifting spending from the military to other types of government spending would be more broadly beneficial to the economy. It’s hard to imagine many people on the left who wouldn’t support this. So why is it portrayed as a “quandary”?
As a first time reader of fair.org, I’m appalled by the bias of this article. The first rebuttal using percentage of the GDP is ridiculously dismissed by reducing the cut to single percentage points.
@ Alex, so what does that have to do with the point that this is being presented as a Quandary for the left? Where not wondering if they should cut more, or add more. They are wondering why the WaPo thinks we on the left wouldn’t support the reduction in the military budget and moving some of that money to the actual people and industries in the U.S., instead of going to Fat Cat weapons makers and dealers.
That said, it’s obvious that it is not the Left who is confused.
Um, Alex, I think you misread this piece: The percentage-of-GDP approach to make the military budget look small is the bias of the *WaPo* reporter that this article is criticizing, not the article itself.
The real point is that “military spending creates jobs!” is not a good argument for military spending, because we get more jobs (not to mention other side effects like health care or education) if we spend the money on health care or education instead.
Please avoid this argument that military spending doesn’t create as many jobs as civilian spending. Technically speaking, it would be much too easy to fix that problem and create a lot of jobs: the government could go back to old-fashioned labor-intensive methods of war-fighting. For example, it could bring back the draft and conscript a percentage of the population similar to that of the Vietnam war era. The draft is very job-intensive! Anyway, any spending can be justified by its job-creation possibilities. (Build concentration camps to hold the Occupy folks, anyone?) The key issue should be whether or not the product that the workers produce is something we want or not.
I was prepared to add a lot to the article but am quite content. Nice job, Peter!
Too bad the job-creation graphic exaggerates the differences by not having a zero line. Couldn’t we have a little visual truth?
There would be a lot of dislocation were the military spending cut drastically, and fear of that creates an automatic outcry from Mil-Industrial-Complex workers, owners, communities. The answer? Keep up the spending, but on condition that the beneficiaries of that spending NOT PRODUCE ANYTHING, NOT FIGHT ANYONE ANYWHERE, and that they keep passing the money along to their subcontractors and all other current payees. The world would be better off — U.S. included. And no economic dislocation.
Job losses are only guaranteed, if you limit solutions to what has failed before. FAIR, are you aware of National Hiring Day idea? There is a solution to the jobs problem and it could quickly put hundreds of thousands of people back to work. It is not pro left or right. It is not from any corporation, it’s outside the government control, it’s totally voluntary, works in about one week, and helps all with little sacrifice from anyone.
National Hiring Day – This is a day that corporations are encouraged to fill open positions and larger corporations to hire one or more new employees. Those corporations that cannot hire, are asked to stop firing for that month.
Well my first answer would be that the president and his staff put less faith into the research institutes findings than you may believe.@at a time when obama is fighting to make monthly job numbers appear better he is simply unwilling to make any grand sweeping economic arrangements with the military that may or may not effect the balance sheets in a positive way.That and of course disarming at a time when his generals are showing him increased threats is not so easy.
Military spending creates few jobs. Money spent on a tank, for instance, has no velocity. Once built, the tank is not an exchangeable good, whereas if we were spending the same money hiring the unemployed to rebuild the infrastructure, nearly everything they received would be spent and then spent again by the folks with whom they did business. The multiplier effect of money spent on the military is just not that high.
And if military preparedness is our aim, that’s been achieved in spades. If you add the US forces to NATO’s and to just a few of our other allies’, we project 65% of the world’s land power, 80% of the world’s sea power, and 75% of its air power. We straddle the globe like a colossus, to muffle a metaphor. If the roman gods were here to cast us for a play, we’d be Mars, no doubt. Amidst a domestic setting that is increasingly Third World by most measures, we do excel in the art of killing and domination.
The hawks want endless war and endless war spending because constant hostilities enrich a few, foster the tensions that make the masses willing to surrender liberty, and assure the ascendancy of the ruling class. On the other hand, spending an equal sum on peace would empower the people by making them more secure in their health and employment. The ruling elite cannot long tolerate the self-sufficiency that might break the dependency chain between them and their ruled. For the same reasons, the US has always fought to undermine countries like Venezuela and Cuba, when they decided they wanted out of the Yanqui economic orbit.
As the economy continues to swing between sputter and breakdown, more repressive measures will issue forth from our masters. Increased military budgets will be necessary to preserve the Empire and maintain control of the populace here at home. The next 100 years will not be pretty.
The problems we have with the sequester are that it is cutting back spending just as we need such spending to goose the economy. Otherwise we fall farther back into a deeper Depression that the CMSM can’t ignore.
The only way such an imperial sized military can pay its own way is if it started being used to plunder resources in other places. Otherwise it is just a drain on the treasury.
Sounds like disarmament for the sake of more wasteful government programs to me night gaunt