Defense Spending Still Out Of Control
Budgets, as we all know, are the guts of government.
When you want to get past all the rhetoric, all the specialinterest pleading - whether it’s for milk-shy Hottentots, the glandular obese or subsidized tobacco farmers - you look at the bottom line. That’s where you find out who got hurt and who got helped.
One of the dirty little secrets of the Washington press corps is that few reporters actually read the budget anymore. But the Republican budget resolution passed a few days ago is perfect for lazy students - an outline of where the money is to go, with all those nasty little details about taxes and “restraints” left out. Here we have the Cliff’s Notes of budgeteering.
When the Republicans prate about “revolution” (boy, they really have talked themselves into nevernever land, haven’t they?) you want to check your wallet. And the most amazing thing about the GOP’s budget resolution is that it changes absolutely nothing about the second-most expensive item in the national budget.
Same old stuff. We will continue to spend more money on the military than on any other item except Social Security. Because the Republican budget plan cuts so much domestic spending, the military actually will get an increase in its proportion of discretionary spending, outranking all other spending by an overwhelming margin.
Today, the United States spends more than three times as much on defense as does its closest rival (Russia) and almost as much on national security as the rest of the world combined, according to the Center for Defense Information.
In 1995, President Clinton will spend $30 billion more on defense, in constant dollars, than did Richard Nixon 20 years ago and more than his own secretary of defense argued was necessary in 1992.
The House budget resolution gave the Pentagon $10 billion more than it had asked for - and the Pentagon is not shy about asking. The Senate split the difference, giving the military a mere $5 billion more than it had asked for.
This is the same Pentagon that recently announced it had misplaced $14.7 billion in change over the last few years - it just fell between the cracks, with no record of it at all.
But we have some idea of what happened to that $14.7 billion from a recent report that Gen. Joseph W. Ashy and his cat had taken an empty 200-seat military plane from Italy to Colorado at a cost of $116,000, rather than taking a commercial flight for $650 (plus cat shipping).
The four most commonly cited reasons for continuing to increase military spending six years after the end of the Cold War are:
Readiness - Right-wing Republicans and Pentagon brass are engaged in a disinformation campaign to promote the idea that the military suffers from the kind of readiness problems that Ronald Reagan used effectively against Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Since the Berlin Wall came down, Pentagon forces have declined by 25 percent and new weapons spending has dropped by 50 percent, but readiness spending has declined by only 10 percent. And in the last year, readiness spending increased by $5 billion while the overall military budget declined by 3 percent.
The Pentagon now spends more on readiness (about $60,000 per person) than it did during the Reagan and Bush years and 50 percent more than it did during the Carter years.
The two-war scenario - The Pentagon wants enough money to be able to fight two full-scale wars simultaneously.
OK. Assuming that our diplomats are dumb enough to get us into that box, the Pentagon says the six nations most likely to cause us major trouble are North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya and Cuba. Well, we spend 27 times as much money on the military as all six combined.
Jobs - Just one example: We are about to build another Sea Wolf submarine - which everyone agrees we don’t need - to keep skilled shipbuilders at work. Cost: $3 billion.
Maritech, a joint defense and transportation program currently funded at $50 million, helps naval shipbuilding contractors enter commercial growth markets. Because of the explosion in global trade, commercial shipbuilding - now almost wholly dominated by the Japanese - will be a wonderfully lucrative market.
If we put just the $3 billion for the Sea Wolf - not to mention the money for all the other garbage we don’t need, such as the B-2 Stealth bomber, V-22 Osprey, C-17A transport and obsolete Cold War weapons - into Maritech, we not only could make piles of money but we could preserve our shipbuilding skills as well.
According to Seymour Melman of the National Committee for Economic Conversion and Disarmament, cuts in valueless military parts during the next six years would save at least $875.7 billion. With that, we could cover much of the deficit for those six years and reinvest in infrastructure.
Insecurity, or “The world’s a dangerous place” - Today, our problems include nuclear proliferation, terrorism, cultists putting poison gas in subways. But very little of the money we spend on preparation for nuclear or conventional warfare is going to help us with these problems.
Here we get into the realms of intelligence, foreign aid and diplomacy - not to mention mental health. Imagination and foresight will keep us safer from these perils than military spending will, and an economy that includes us all is our best weapon against domestic paranoiacs.
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