December 15, 2007

• Imagine

  Imagine a Campaign that Called for Slashing Military Spending 75%

  by Dave Lindorff

  Thursday 2007-12-13

  While the Democratic and Republican candidates for president blather on
  about non-issues like who will be meaner to immigrants, who will use the most
  water on torture victims, who wanted to be president at the youngest age, who’s
  the best Christian and other such nonsense, and while Congress and the president
  dance their meaningless dance of pretend conflict, let’s for a moment ponder
  something more momentous.

  What if the US just packed up and left Iraq and Afghanistan, and brought
  the troops all home, shut down the 750-odd overseas bases we operate around the
  globe, and slashed our military budget by 75 percent?

  That would be an instant savings of roughly $365 billion per
  year.

  Now, the first thing we need to do is address the criticism that such an
  action would be abandoning the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, whose countries
  we have been systematically destroying for the last four to six years.

  Okay. I agree we have an obligation here. So let’s allocate say $50 billion
  in annual aid to those two countries, to be funneled through international aid
  organizations, from the U.N. to CARE and the Red Cross/Red Crescent.

  That still leaves $315 billion in funds to play with.

  We also have to address those who will ask fearfully if we aren’t opening
  ourselves to attack from our many enemies abroad.

  But hold on a minute. If we cut the US military budget down to a paltry
  $115 billion a year, that would still leave us with by far the largest military
  budget in the entire world. The next biggest spender on its military is China,
  at $62.5 billion, followed by Russia, at $62 billion. That is to say, our
  military budget, if slashed by three quarters, would still be about equal to
  Russia’s and China’s military budgets combined. And that only tells part of the
  story. Most of China’s army is a repressive police force, required to keep order
  in what is a widely despised dictatorship, and would never be available for
  foreign adventures. (That’s why China, with a million or more soldiers, hasn’t
  ever invaded Taiwan, with a population of just 23 million. The army China could
  spare for an invasion would probably be no larger than the one little Taiwan
  could field to defend itself.) The same can be said for Russia, which is
  eternally in danger of splitting apart into myriad smaller states, and has to be
  held together by threat of force. Figuring that neither China nor Russia is
  likely to attack us anyway, given that one needs us to buy all the junk they
  make, and the other needs us to buy their oil, maybe we should look at those
  “axis of evil” states and their ilk, that might think we’re easy pickin’s if we
  were to slash our military spending.

  Well, maybe not. It turns out if you add up all the military budgets of
  America’s other “major” enemies—those so-called “rogue” states like Cuba, Iran,
  Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria—and throw in a few extra possible hostiles
  for good measure like Myanmar, Somalia and, oh, what the heck, Grenada (you
  never know when that troublesome little island might have another revolution!),
  it comes to a grand total of $15 billion spent on military stuff. That’s less
  than one-seventh of what we’d still be spending.

  And of course we wouldn’t be alone. Our allies—Britain, Germany, France,
  Japan, Israel, Holland, Canada, Italy, Australia, South Korea and Spain for
  example, though there are surely more who would come to our aid in a
  crisis—collectively spend another $258 billion on their militaries (and yet even
  today we have our military based in many of those countries. Go figure!). So we
  would hardly be at anybody’s mercy.

  We could even take a few billion of that $115 military budget and shift it
  productively from our huge and useless strategic nuclear program (you know, the
  one that just lost six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles for 36 hours, and flew
  them across the country, unprotected and unnoticed) over to operations like
  border patrol, satellite monitoring, and the Coast Guard, where it might
  actually help protect us, instead of just funding futuristic weapons that will
  never be used for anything but helping generals justify their stars by having
  units to command.

  So here we would be with still, by a factor of two, the largest and most
  advanced military in the world, but at peace and with $315 billion a year
  suddenly freed up and at our disposal.

  What might we do with all that money?

  Well, for starters, if we accept for argument’s sake that the Social
  Security System is running at a deficit and will eventually be defunded (which,
  by the way, I do not for a minute believe), actuaries say that injecting about
  $130 billion a year into the fund (the equivalent of increasing everyone’s SSI
  payroll tax by 2 percent) would solve the alleged problem indefinitely, allowing
  all current and future Americans to count on an inflation-adjusted secure
  retirement forever. So let’s do that. Then there’s education. Currently, the
  federal government spends about $58 billion a year on education. That gives us
  classroom sizes in our cities of 30-35 kids (40 here in Philadelphia). That’s
  not education—that’s child abuse (and teacher abuse). So what say we boost that
  amount by 50 percent—a much better educational reform than a lot of stupid “No
  Child Left Behind” testing regimens. Then there’s healthcare, on which the
  government spends a paltry $52 billion, leaving us with declining life
  expectancies and infant mortality rates, particularly among our poorest
  citizens, that are a scandal. Let’s boost that spending by 50 percent,
  too.

  Geez! We still have another $130 billion left!

  The federal government right now only spends some $40 billion a year on
  science, energy and the environment. That includes nuclear power and waste
  containment, and the entire NASA budget. Given the global climate change
  disaster we’re facing, we should probably double that, with the added $40
  billion going all to environmental research, don’t you think?

  Now we’re left with $90 billion.

  Well, it turns out that’s about what the government spends on “social
  programs.” You know, like welfare—the thing that we were supposedly ending?
  Truth is, of course, that over the last decade, the number of poor people and
  hungry people in the US has been rising, not falling, so maybe we should rethink
  that “ending welfare as we know it” mantra, and start thinking about improving
  the lives of those at the bottom of the ladder. That extra $90 billion, by
  doubling social programs—especially if it was spent on housing and job
  creation—would go a long way towards making America a better place for all. It
  would also reduce crime significantly, meaning we’d have a whole lot of money
  freed up that currently goes to police and prisons, so we could spent that money
  on other good stuff too.

  So who’s going to make this eminently sensible proposal?

  I’m frankly sick to death of hearing about how “tough” our next president
  is going to be.

  Our current president has shown just what being tough is good for: nothing.
  The country is less safe, we’ve got 80,000 returned soldiers suffering from
  life-long injuries, we’ve made enemies out of friends all over the world, and
  this country’s been going down the tube, with joblessness rising, the economy
  teetering and the once mighty dollar headed for Third World currency
  status.

  Until I hear political candidates start talking about slashing military
  spending -- and I mean on the order of 75 percent, none of this nickel-and-dime
  stuff, and about funding the things that really need funding -- I’m not even
  listening to these moronic campaigns.

  -----------------

  DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest
  book, co-authored by Barbara Olshansky, is "The Case for Impeachment" (St.
  Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at
  www.thiscantbehappening.net

  • 7:07 pm
  • 16 Comments