The US Should Cut Military Spending in Half - Cato Institute

[Ichingcarpenter]

Surprise to see the article there but here it is

To really keep us safe, we should slash defense spending. Americans should prepare for fewer wars, not different ones. Far from providing our defense, our military posture endangers us. It drags us into others' conflicts, provokes animosity, and wastes resources. We need a defense budget worthy of the name. We need military restraint. And that would allow us to cut defense spending roughly in half.
To understand why that is conservative, consider how much we spend on defense relative to both our purported rivals and our past. Our defense budget is almost half the world's, even leaving out nuclear weapons, the wars, veterans, and homeland security. It is also more than we spent at any point during the cold war. When that struggle ended, we simply gave back the Reagan buildup and kept spending at average cold war levels. Then we began another buildup in 1998 that nearly doubled nonwar defense spending.

There are no enemies to justify such spending. Invasion and civil war are unthinkable here. North Korea, Syria, and Iran trouble their citizens and neighbors, but with small economies, shoddy militaries, and a desire to survive, they pose little threat to us. Their combined military spending is one-sixtieth of ours.

Russia and China are incapable of territorial expansion that should pose any worry, unless we put our troops on their borders. China's defense spending is less than one-fifth of ours. We spend more researching and developing new weapons than Russia spends on its military. And with an economy larger than ours, the European Union can protect itself. Our biggest security problem, terrorism, is chiefly an intelligence problem arising from a Muslim civil war. Our military has little to do with it.

We should embrace this geopolitical fortune, not look for trouble. If we decided to avoid Iraq-style occupations and fight only to defend ourselves or important allies, we could cut our ground forces in half.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10152

[grantcart]

1. There should be two deductions for federal tax

One showing all of the combined costs of the federal government


And a second line showing the deduction for the Department of Defense and including all of the interest payments for unfunded wars.

[Lasher]

2. The author, Benjamin H. Friedman, is right.

We need to cut our military spending by at least half. But all we ever hear about cutting is the sinister entitlement programs.

FWIW, Here's a link to the same article, published on April 27 in the CS Monitor:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0427/p09s01-coop.html

[Ichingcarpenter]

3. Yes I know it was in the CSM but I was surprised the Cato Institute published it

They are not a liberal think tank.

[Lasher]

4. Cato is a libertarian think tank.

They are correct in this position, as I said, but watch out for them on other issues such as Social Security. Wiki article here.

I just emailed this article to some friends and linked to it in the CS Monitor instead of Cato. Thinking others might prefer to do the same, I shared the link.

Thanks for posting the article. It's good and I guess I must have missed it the first time around.

[struggle4progress]

5. . we’ve . signed a $680 billion defense bill without . conversation while . having a . heated debate

about $90 billion a year for health care . http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/my-friendly-nudge-of-the-day/

[struggle4progress]

6. Defense Spending Creates Fewer Jobs Than Other Types of Spending

... a paper by economist Robert Pollin published in 2007 by The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst - entitled "The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities" - .. concludes:

... defense spending creates 8,555 total jobs with $1 billion in spending. This is the fewest number of jobs of any of the alternative uses that we present. Thus, personal consumption generates 10,779 jobs, 26.2 percent more than defense, health care generates 12,883 jobs, education generates 17,687, mass transit is at 19,795, and construction for weatherization/infrastructure is 12,804. From this list we see that with two of the categories, education and mass transit, the total number of jobs created with $1 billion in spending is more than twice as many as with defense ...

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Defense-Spending-Creates-F-by-George-Washington-091113-637.html

[glitch]

16. Yep - thanks for posting.

So many Americans buy the propaganda that military spending is the best (or even only!) way to boost an economy.

[struggle4progress]

7. Blood and Treasure

Is Afghanistan worth the sacrifice?
Laura Burke | November 27, 2009 |

... From 2000 to 2008, Texas defense contactors raked in $255 billion, according to federal data compiled by governmentcontractswon.com ... but 2008 yielded the highest profits of the decade.

Halliburton, the Houston-based oil-field services company once headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, has been the state’s most notorious war profiteer. KBR, formerly a subsidiary of Halliburton and also headquartered in Houston, is the U.S. Army’s largest construction and contracting group in Iraq and Afghanistan. Aerospace giants clustered in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, CSC Technologies and DynCorp, to name a few—have also swept in huge defense contracts to produce military aircraft, conventional missiles and military satellites.

As Texas elites grow fatter off the wars, ordinary folks are left to shoulder not only the personal losses but also the mounting costs. In tax dollars, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan had cost $944 billion as of September, according to the Congressional Research Service—$232 billion of it in Afghanistan. Fifty-eight percent of the proposed federal budget for 2009 was slated for defense spending. By contrast, just 5 percent went to health care ...

http://www.texasobserver.org/features/blood-and-treasure

[azul]

12. That is a special type of pork that pours out of the taxpayer barrel,

and has a distinctive cadaverine flavor.

[struggle4progress]

8. What if for one year .. we allocated as much money for infrastructure as we did for defense?

... Well, this year, that would mean devoting $680 billion to investments in infrastructure ... With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that. Which makes one wonder: where are all the economists, wringing their hands over cost-benefit analyses of these defense expenditures? Does anyone doubt that the net benefit of $100 billion spent on high-speed rail is easily higher than that for the last $100 billion spent on defense? ...

http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2009/11/because-as-we-all-know-military-spending-doesnt-count/

[NecklyTyler]

9. The defense contractors know how to work the system

After all, it was the defense contractors who built the system.

Step one: Diversify production across the country until there are factories in every Congressional District.

Step two: Have the well paid, smooth talking, goodie distributing lobbyists tell Congress how important it is to their district to keep the defense plants running.

Step three: Sit back and watch as all the congress critters ban together to protect the jobs from 'their' defense plants

[azul]

13. step four: boogie-man attact to scare the public witless.

step five: Patriot Act to drive real patriots mad.

[StarfarerBill]

10. I'm loathe to agree with a big-L Libertarian lot like Cato...

...but on this particular issue they're right, and probably don't go far enough.

[Mari333]

11. KNR

[DavidDvorkin]

14. I'd say three quarters, at least, but half would be a great start

I know that they're Libertarian, but I'm still surprised to see this from them. I've always had the impression that the Cato Institute was the kind of Libertarian that tends toward rightwing authoritarianism, but perhaps my impression was wrong.

[Ichingcarpenter]

15. The writer is not a libertarian but I too was surprised

they posted his OP piece from the Christian Science Monitor

[salguine]

17. Getting aggressive about cutting out all the fraud and waste would probably

have the effect of cutting it in half anyway.

[TexasObserver]

18. Recommend

[mike_c]

19. absolutely agree!

eom

[yurbud]

20. common sense that will get no traction in Washington

[yurbud]

21. this is what I was thinking after 9/11 and it seemed like the whole country had lost their fucking

minds.

Now it's clear it's just in DC.

[Sherman A1]

22. Half would be a great start.

time to separate the boys from their toys.

[classysassy]

23. Both parties

love war as long as they or their friends and family are excluded.BRING BACK THE DRAFT,and watch the warmongering decline.

[Doctor_J]

24. Call me suspicious

Where were these people when the Repukes were in the WH and Congress?