The
2020 Democratic Party Platform said
that Democrats would reduce military spending:
“We can maintain a strong defense and protect
our safety and security for less.” Right on!
Get out the vote!
Then
a Democratic president proposed an increase
each of the next three years, just as his
Republican predecessor
had done each year. And Congress not only went
along but went over and above the proposed
increases, with more bipartisan harmony than
we are usually led to believe exists.
Congress
is having a remarkably difficult time deciding
whether to put an extra $100 billion or so
into more weapons for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan,
and the border of Mexico, with various groups
of Congress Members opposing one or another of
those expenditures, and the combining of them
failing thus far to win passage.
But
the military spending Congress does agree on
year after year is so vast as to be beyond
easy visualization or comprehension. The U.S.
government spends well over $1 trillion each
year on its military. A 2019
article from a Quincy Institute author
at TomDispatch identifies
costs of $1.25 trillion. This includes the
annual Pentagon base budget, plus war budget,
plus nuclear weapons in the Department of
Energy, plus the Department of Homeland
Security, and other military spending.
Military
spending is over half of federal discretionary
spending — the money Congress decides how to
spend each year (so, not including spending
mandated over many years, such as much of
Social Security or Medicare). And yet it is
extremely rare for a candidate for Congress to
have any position at all on military spending
or the general outline of the federal budget,
and even rarer for a media outlet to ask them
for one. One reason this is odd is that a tiny
fraction of military spending, if diverted
elsewhere, could radically transform just
about any of the policy areas that candidates
do have positions on.
My
organization, World BEYOND War, has put
up six
billboards in
Berkeley and Oakland that each say in big
black letters on a yellow background “3% of
U.S. Military Spending Could End Starvation on
Earth.”
The
3% figure comes from dividing what the United
Nations says it would cost to end starvation
globally by what the U.S. government spends on
its military each year.
In
2008, the United Nations said that
$30 billion per year could end starvation on
Earth. The Food and Agriculture Organization
of the United Nations tells us that number is
still up to date.
This
does not factor in the dramatic increase in
the past few months of people facing
starvation, 80%
of whom worldwide
are now
in Gaza.
But clearly the most important first step to
help them would be to cease putting billion of
dollars into weapons for the war.
Starvation
is not the only thing you could address with
$30 billion a year (or $600 billion over the
past 20 years). For $30 billion a year, you
could hire 33 thousand teachers at $90,000
each, or provide 3 million units of public
housing at $10,000 each, or provide 60 million
households with wind power at $500 each. Can
you imagine if we valued education or housing
or the sustainability of life on Earth that
much?
Those
alternatives would not only benefit huge
numbers of people directly. They would also
have greater positive economic impact than
military spending does. Far from being the
jobs program often claimed, military
spending produces fewer
jobs than other public spending, and fewer
jobs than never taxing the money from working
people at all. It may sound grotesquely
sociopathic to defend war as a jobs program,
but it’s also just plain false, as military
spending actually eliminates jobs.
U.S.
military spending dwarfs
the cost of
most infrastructure and social needs spending
legislation, the cost of any other item (or
dozen items) of federal discretionary
spending, and the military spending of any
other nation. Of 230 other countries, the
U.S. spends
more on militarism than 227
of them combined. In 2022 military
spending per
capita,
the U.S. government trailed only Qatar and
Israel. All of the top 27 nations in per
capita military spending are U.S. weapons
customers.
The
U.S. pressures other nations to spend more. Of
230 other countries, the U.S. exports more
weaponry than
228 of them combined. Much of Donald Trump’s
opposition to NATO, between 2017 and 2020,
amounted to badgering NATO members to spend
more on militarism. (With enemies like these,
who needs boosters?)
Check
out these basic
military spending numbers —
in the year 2022 and measured in 2022 U.S.
dollars, from SIPRI (so, leaving out a huge
chunk of U.S. spending):
· Total
$2,209 billion
· U.S.
$877 billion
· All
countries on Earth but U.S., Russia, China,
and India $872 billion
· NATO
members $1,238 billion
· NATO
“partners across the globe” $153 billion
· NATO
Istanbul Cooperation Initiative $25 billion
(no data from UAE)
· NATO
Mediterranean Dialogue $46 billion
· NATO
Partners for Peace excluding Russia and
including Sweden $71 billion
· All
NATO combined excluding Russia $1,533 billion
· Entire
Non-NATO world including Russia (no data from
North Korea) $676 billion (44% of NATO and
friends)
· Russia
$86 billion (9.8% of U.S.)
· China
$292 billion (33.3% of U.S.)
· Iran
$7 billion (0.8% of U.S.)
The
U.S. public has tended for decades to be less
supportive of enormous military spending than
elected officials, but also to have very
little grasp of how much it is or how it
compares to other things. Since almost nobody
can tell you what exactly a trillion dollars
in military spending buys, it follows that
almost nobody can tell you why $970 billion
wouldn’t be just as good or better. The
Pentagon, the one department that has never
passed an audit, cannot answer such questions
itself.
So,
regardless of your belief, or lack
thereof,
in the wisdom of militarism in
general,
you are asked to take it on faith
that
something better than ending
starvation
is being done with the last
little
bit of the military budget. Where is
our
usual skepticism? We need it badly!
