The People Over Pentagon Act, reviewed
Speaking Security Newsletter | Note n°196 | 24 February 2023
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Feel Good Friday
Good news: a bill reintroduced this week called the People Over Pentagon Act would cut annual US military expenditures by $100 billion. Is this a radical proposal? Thanks to Joe Biden embracing key features of Trump’s reckless foreign policy, the answer is No: it basically comes down to whether Congress wants to enact a record-setting Pentagon budget in FY2024 or one that merely surpasses every military budget during the Cold War.
^Alt text for screen readers: The Trump-Biden Pentagon spending spree. This chart shows annual military spending from 1976 to 2023 using two yellow lines—the solid line is inflation-adjusted dollars; the dotted line is nominal dollars. There’s a big climb in the 1980s, another spike from 2008 to 2011 during the US troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a sharp upward climb starting from 2018 through 2023 thanks to Trump and Biden. I have this range highlighted in gray. Figures refer to national defense discretionary budget authority and I used a GDP deflator to control for inflation.
Payoff
The P>P Act is a rebuke of a militarized and counterproductive global posture. But it also gestures toward a more productive and less provincial economic policy. The fact is Biden largely failed to enact his domestic agenda in year one of his presidency and effectively gave up on trying in year two. As a result, the biggest federal jobs program is still centered on armament production instead of building stuff ordinary people can access and benefit from. Military spending is the least efficient way to boost employment, so even a modest shift in resources from Pentagon accounts to clean energy and infrastructure projects would create nearly 300,000 additional jobs. It’s a tantalizing proposition.
^Alt text for screen readers: Shifting $100 billion from the Pentagon to clean energy or infrastructure creates 290,000 jobs. This chart compares the number of jobs created with $100 billion in clean energy and infrastructure spending versus military spending. The former would create an estimated 980,000 jobs, while an equal investment in the latter only produces 690,000. To calculate these figures, I cited research by Heidi Peltier—one of my favorite scholars—from the Costs of War project.
-Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)
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