A military budget to knock your socks off
War spending eats at economy like cancer
By Gary Wilson
Since Sept. 11, President George W. Bush has become an
advocate of big government spending.
Bush's budget proposal for fiscal year 2002 was $25 billion
higher than what it had been before the attack on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, with most of the new money going
to the military-industrial complex.
"Bush's military request was once controversial, but
opposition melted after the Sept. 11 attacks," the Washington
Post reported Oct. 2. "The $686 billion [budget proposal]
reflects a 7 percent increase over current funding, nearly
double what Bush originally proposed."
The military-industrial complex moved quickly to exploit the
Sept. 11 tragedy and maximize its profits. An agenda was
quickly put forward to increase the Pentagon budget,
concentrate more powers in the White House, reduce
Congressional oversight of the military, and expand the U.S.
military's sphere of operations to include domestic
functions.
An anti-terrorism bill proposed by Attorney General John
Ashcroft threatens to severely limit civil liberties and
increase police powers. It originally included provisions that
would allow the Attorney General to order the indefinite
detention of any non-citizen. This ominous measure seems to
have been scaled back to seven days' detention without charges
after a struggle in the House Judiciary Committee, where Rep.
John Conyers Jr. of Michigan is the ranking Democrat.
The Center for Security Policy--a Washington think tank for
the military industries behind the so-called National Missile
Defense program--says that it expects the Star Wars program
will now get full funding, despite the fact that in attacks
like those on Sept. 11 an expensive "missile shield" would be
useless. But the Washington Post agrees that "in the past two
weeks, opposition in Congress to missile defense has melted
away."
Pentagon gobbles up the budget
According to the Center for Defense Information--a think
tank established in 1972 by retired U.S. military officers to
monitor the Pentagon and oppose the war in Vietnam--Bush's
proposed military increases will mean that the Pentagon will
get more than half of the federal discretionary budget.
The total federal budget for fiscal year 2002 is $1.9
trillion. Of that, about one third is discretionary spending,
that is, funds that the president must request and Congress
must act on each year. That's the $686 billion budget proposal.
The other two-thirds of the federal budget is mandatory
spending, that is, funds that the government spends
automatically unless the president and Congress change the laws
that mandate them. This includes Social Security, Medicare,
food stamps, and federal pensions--as well as debt payments to
the banks.
"Pentagon spending now accounts for over half (50.5 percent)
of all discretionary spending," the CDI's Defense Monitor
reports in its August 2001 issue.
The Defense Monitor also reports, "As the world's lone
superpower, it is not surprising that the United States spends
more on its military than any other nation. What is surprising
is just how large the U.S. share of world military spending
actually is, and the fact that while defense budgets of most
countries are shrinking, U.S. military spending continues to
grow."
The United States spends more on the military than the
combined spending of the next 15 nations: Russia, Japan, China,
Britain, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Brazil, India,
South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Canada, and Iran.
The advocates of military increases don't dwell on the big
boost in profits that will go to the military industries, such
as Boeing; they all talk of responding to the Sept. 11 attack.
But many of the statements imply that the military increases
will pull the economy out of the deepening recession.
This view is particularly popular with Democratic Party
liberals, who can't explain how making an already gigantic
military budget any bigger would prevent attacks like those on
Sept. 11 and who won't point to imperialist foreign policy as
the greatest danger to the safety and security of the people of
the United States.
'Military Keynesianism'
Liberal and conservative economists have begun promoting a
policy called "military Keynesianism."
"Keynesianism" refers to the use of government deficit
spending to stimulate the economy, a policy advocated by
economist John Maynard Keynes during the Great Depression of
the 1930s. Keynes promoted increasing social spending programs
such as public works projects. But the "military Keynesians"
point out that the spending on social programs did not end the
economic crisis; it was only the military buildup to World War
II that seemed to pull the U.S. and world capitalism out of the
global depression.
The "military Keynesian" view was endorsed in Business Week
the first week of October by the reactionary economist Robert
Barro, who is now an advocate of big government spending--for
the military. A liberal endorsement could be found in an
article titled style Stimulus" on economy.com, written by
Augustine Faucher.
"Before the attacks, the economy was limping along. With the
collapse in business investment, only consumer spending was
keeping the economy moving. There was concern that increasing
layoffs, highlighted by the jump last month in the unemployment
rate, would cause consumers to cut back and finally tip the
economy into recession," Faucher writes.
"Policymakers had taken steps to address the weakness. The
Federal Reserve has been cutting interest rates since the
beginning of the year, and with the tax cut, in particular the
rebate checks, Congress and the Bush administration provided
additional resources to the consumers who have been keeping the
economy going. However, before the attacks, one obstacle to
further fiscal stimulus was the Social Security 'lockbox.'
"The lockbox was a political consensus between the
Republican and Democratic parties that the portion of the
federal budget surplus attributable to Social Security be used
only for debt reduction, not for additional tax cuts or
spending increases. While the lockbox provided an important
source of fiscal restraint, it also limited the government's
ability to use tax and spending policy to address the sluggish
economy.
"Now, of course, the picture has changed completely. With
the attacks, Congress has rightfully focused on the need to
care for the injured, clear away the debris, prepare for the
rebuilding of Manhattan and the Pentagon, and provide the
military and intelligence agencies with the resources necessary
to combat terrorism."
The "resources necessary" means an increase in military
spending, which, the article suggests, will pull the economy
out of the recession.
The "military Keynesian" solution ignores the many
differences between the 1930s and now.
At that time, there were millions of unemployed. Industry
and commerce were stagnant, some at a virtual standstill. The
United States did not have a standing army or navy.
Globally, capitalism was in a deflationary cycle. Prices of
most basic commodities had reached rock bottom.
Today, the capitalist economy is not deflated, but rather is
inflated.
In addition, the war buildup being prepared is not a World
War II-type conflict with its far-reaching draft that put
millions of unemployed youths into the military and put
factories to work to outfit the new recruits. Rather it is a
high-tech, capital-intensive war that uses only elite
forces.
This will not stimulate the economy like the military
spending leading up to World War II. Rather it will be more
like the Gulf War of 1990-91, which deepened the debt to the
banks and pushed the economy downward. The war-driven recession
that followed was behind the defeat of George Bush in the 1992
elections.
Workers cannot rely on the stimulus of military spending to
save their jobs. It is a false "solution" that leads to
disaster and mass destruction. It is the bosses' answer to a
capitalist recession, geared as always to preserving their
profits at the expense of the people. Organization, militancy
and a program that puts workers and their jobs before profits
is the only answer.
Reprinted from the Oct. 11, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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