The military is the nation’s largest and most firmly entrenched entitlement program, one that takes half of every tax dollar. Even if “national security” is considered our number one priority (a dubious choice when the real unemployment rate is over 16%), estimates are that the military budget could be cut in half or more and we would still have the most powerful military machine in the world. Our enemies (if any) are now “terrorists,” not countries; and what is needed to contain them (if anything) is local policing, not global warfare. Much of our military hardware is just good for “shock and awe,” not needed for any “real and present danger.”
Military spending is the very essence of “built-in obsolescence”: it turns out products that are designed to blow up. The military is not subject to ordinary market principles but works on a “cost-plus” basis, with producers reimbursed for whatever they have spent plus a guaranteed profit. Gone are the usual competitive restraints that keep capitalist corporations “lean and mean.” Private contractors hired by the government on no-bid contracts can be as wasteful and inefficient as they like and still make a tidy profit. Yet legislators looking to slash wasteful “entitlements” persist in overlooking this obvious elephant in the room.
The reason massive military spending is considered the most “obvious” way to produce a fiscal stimulus is simply that it is the only form of direct government spending that gets a pass from the deficit hawks. The economy is desperate to get money flowing through it, and today only the government is in a position to turn on the spigots; but there is a tourniquet on government spending. That is true for everything but the military, the only program on which the government is allowed to spend seemingly without limit, often even without oversight.
Why is the military’s half of the pie sacrosanct? Wasteful and unnecessary military programs get a pass from legislators because the military is also our largest and most secure jobs program, one that has penetrated into the nooks and crannies of Every Town U.S.A. If it were disbanded, the economy would be crippled by soaring unemployment, plant closures, and bankruptcies.
