How Our Trillion-Dollar Empire Is the Cause of Our 'Deficit Problem'
By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on December 8, 2010 Source
The United States spends more on its military
and security services than the rest of the world combined,
yet in the
midst of a
major debate
over our fiscal situation, that enormous drain on our national
treasure isn't really "on the table" in any serious way. Obama's
deficit commission recommended cutting the Pentagon's purse, but
the thrust of
its focus was on veterans' pensions and health-care—rather than,
say, maintaining costly bases to defend such imperiled allies as
Italy and
Germany—and the spending reductions were largely symbolic relative
to the level of bloat that plagues our security budget.
One often hears that, in very rough terms, about a
fifth of the federal
budget goes to national security, another fifth pays for Social
Security, a fifth or so is spent on Medicare and Medicaid and everything
else
makes up about 40 percent. But that, like much of the discussion
of "defense" spending,
is misleading—it only counts dollars allocated in the annual
defense budget, and in “emergency” supplemental bills.
That belies the reality that spending on the American
security state is dispersed throughout the federal budget. So while
next year’s
defense spending, narrowly defined, is expected to come in at $711 billion,
when you include all the extra dollars hidden away in other parts of
the budget, that number will rise to as high as $1.45 trillion. That
would represent around 40 percent of next year’s budget.
With Washington in the grip of deficit hysteria, that’s
the elephant in the room whose name is never mentioned.
As I wrote last week, the
almost universally held belief that the the U.S. faces a deficit
problem is wrong, and for two simple reasons. First, we
have a very small government compared to the rest of the developed world—between 2004 and 2007,
the U.S. ranked 24th out of 26 countries in the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in overall government
spending as
a share of our economic output. And we also currently have one
of the lowest tax burdens—In 2008, we ranked 26th out of the 30
OECD countries
in that category.
Nonetheless, America’s elites have coalesced around the idea that
in order to keep our tax rates among the lowest in the wealthy world,
we’ll need to swallow some painful “shared sacrifice” (which
in Washington usually means working people sacrificing some economic
security and the wealthy getting another tax cut). But it’s important
to recognize that it’s an ideological choice to view the projected “budget
gap” as a structural, economic problem driven primarily by the
growth of “entitlements”—it’s not a belief grounded
in objective fact.
Instead of the ubiquitous stories about our "deficit crisis," the
media could just as easily frame the country’s fiscal outlook as
a problem of out-of-control health care costs fueled by the practices
of the private insurance industry. As economist Dean Baker pointed out, “If
the United States paid the same amount per person for health care as
any of the 35 countries with longer life expectancies, we would be looking
at huge budget surpluses for the indefinite future.”
And they could also just as easily report that we
face an unsustainably expensive overseas empire problem, made intractable
by a deeply entrenched
military-industrial-information complex. (The two areas of spending
are intertwined—well over a million Americans have served at least
one
tour in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, and tens of thousands of them who
returned grievously wounded will require costly care for years to
come. Economists
estimate that even excluding those costs, the tab for the Iraq and
Afghanistan operations may come in at $3 trillion dollars.)
According to some estimates, 91 percent of
our long-term public debt—and the hundreds of billions we pay in interest on
that debt annually—accrued as a result of foreign military adventures
of the past. Now contrast that with Social Security, which not only
hasn’t
added a dime to the deficit but has run surpluses that have partially
offset
other spending—in areas like “defense”—for almost
30 years.
Take a peek under the hood and check out what drives
the engine
of American empire. By no means are they all wasted dollars—we
live in a dangerous world and need a military. But ours remains
fundamentally mismatched
to the threats we face in the post-Cold War era, despite years of
talk in the halls of the Pentagon about transforming the American
military
for the 21st century.
It still represents an enormous government agency whose
big-ticket weapons systems suck up a fair amount of national treasure
in order to be ready
for a conventional war between great powers that will never materialize.
It’s an agency that’s worked desperately hard to militarize
efforts to combat drugs and terrorism in order to justify retaining,
and since 9/11/01 increasing, its Cold War levels of funding.
Nobody talks about it, but our hugely bloated “defense” budget
is laden with pork—not only basing and construction dollars
carried by members of Congress back to their districts, but big spending
on things
like protection for pipelines, shipping and other privately owned
operations, and subsidized research and development given away for
nothing. It includes
billions in military assistance that subsidizes the conflicts of
countries like Egypt, Israel, Pakistan and Colombia (or, in Egypt’s case,
a payoff to stay on the sidelines) and useless spending on hundreds of
bases around the world bristling with fancy weapons systems that are
ill-suited for the irregular warfare that the Planet’s Only Superpower
is likely to fight.
In large part, the status quo is maintained by the influence
of the defense industry—it lavished $136 million on
law-makers last year.
It’s almost comical at times, like when money for a new jet engine
was forced through Congress over the objections of the Pentagon, which
insisted that the costly project was “unnecessary and a waste of
money.”
And in part, it’s driven by what may be the
greatest false
dichotomy in our national discourse: that we must choose
between cutting our military spending and “maintaining a
strong defense.” The flaw in
that is a matter of simple math: we not only spend more on our
military than the rest of the world combined, we spend
six times what second-place finisher China does on its military.That
means we could cut our military spending in half —making the budget
deficit disappear in a few years,
without raising taxes and while fully funding Social Security and
Medicare—and we’d still outspend our largest rival by
threefold.
That’s more evidence that the federal deficit “problem” isn’t
a problem at all.
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the
author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything
else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate
America).
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights
reserved.
