Military spending produces inequality, a breakdown
Speaking Security Newsletter | Advisory Note for Organizers and Candidates, n°65 | 20 January 2021
Here’s one way the US military budget effectively functions as a self-propelled inequality machine.
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The federal discretionary budget mostly subsidizes militarism
About 40 percent of the money Congress decided to spend in (fiscal year) 2019 went to the private sector via government contracts. All told, $597 billion worth of federal contracts were awarded (a record high).
Of that, 68 percent ($404 billion) was given out by the Department of Defense (DOD) to buy weapons, equipment, and various services. Civilian agencies split the remaining 32 percent ($193 billion), including the Departments of Energy, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, State, Justice, Transportation, and Agriculture.
The top 5 federal contractors are all military contractors and ate $130 billion in taxpayer dollars in 2019
Revenue from public funds between these five firms was $129.6 billion, or 22 percent of all FY2019 federal government contract obligations.
^via Bloomberg
Corporate welfare
While military spending’s economic dividends are too exclusive to help out the working class, the current arrangement does work out quite well for the One Percent: from 2015-19, CEO pay at the top 5 federal contractors nearly surpassed half a billion dollars.
Also here’s the CEO-to-median employee pay ratio for each company for 2019 (except Boeing, which refers to 2018 data), which also contributes to the whole inequality thing:
Boeing, 184:1 (meaning that Boeing’s CEO got paid 184x more than your average Boeing employee)
Northrop Grumman, 177:1
General Dynamics, 157:1
Lockheed, 200:1
Raytheon, 282:1
The wage ratio in the federal government is ~5:1.
Not for the working class, just paid for by the working class
In addition to corporate greed, another reason why military spending produces inequality is because it’s money not spent on social programs, which do reduce inequality.
For example, here are all the jobs lost from investing in defense over literally any other sector:
^Image from Heidi Garrett-Peltier, “War Spending and Lost Opportunities” March, 2019.
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Thanks for your time,
Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)
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