For the same amount of money, investing in healthcare creates twice as many jobs as the military
Speaking Security Newsletter | Advisory Note for Organizers and Candidates, n°136 | 30 November 2021
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Situation
After Democrats cut the reconciliation bill (or the Build Back Better Act/BBB) in half—from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion over 10 years—the provision with the second-highest funding in the bill became a $285 billion tax cut for millionaires.
The tax cut now exceeds a provision that would expand home- and community-based health services. It was $400 billion in the original proposal; now it’s $150 billion in the version passed by the House a couple weeks ago. That works out to a $250 billion reduction, or $25 billion per year, on average.
About a month before those reductions took place, the House voted to increase the Pentagon budget by about the same amount that was cut from home healthcare services in BBB, adding nearly $25 billion on top of Biden’s initial request (which was itself a ~$12 billion increase from FY2021-2022). The Senate Armed Services Committee included the same plus-up in its version of the bill back in July.
Analysis
An underrated reason to be upset about this is that investing $25 billion in the military instead of healthcare means throwing away about 185,000* jobs.
If you’re interested in job creation, putting public funds towards healthcare yields a pretty good ROI. Conversely, military spending is the worst way to boost employment—in general, it’s capital-intensive (not labor-intensive) and its funding/jobs tend to drift overseas.
*I calculated the job production in these two sectors from a $25 billion public investment based on a report by Heidi Garrett-Peltier from Costs of War Project (title: “War Spending and Lost Opportunities,” 2019).
Thanks for your time,
Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)
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