Taking on military spending

President Biden has proposed infrastructure projects including roads and bridges, climate change initiatives, and programs to achieve economic equality. To finance these proposals, the administration is exploring a combination of tax increases on the wealthy and corporations and increasing federal debt. But there also is a third option: reduce military spending.

There has long been bipartisan support for infrastructure projects. However, disagreements on how to pay for them have held up approval. Most of the country’s large corporations, and an increasing number of members of both parties, accept climate change as a reality that requires government action. Most agree there is a need for more economic equality. However, there is disagreement regarding who will bear the costs of the necessary systemic changes.

It is time to consider reducing military spending as one of the ways to pay for these objectives.

A New Haven referendum on the November 2020 ballot read: “Shall Congress prepare for the health and climate crises by transferring funds from the military budget to cities for human needs, jobs and an environmentally sustainable economy?” It passed with 83 percent approval.

In fiscal year 2019, the Pentagon’s budget was $732 billion. A 10 percent reduction results in $7.3 trillion over 10 years. This compares to the Biden’s campaign tax proposals for tax increases for the wealthy and highincome individuals of $3 trillion over the same period. Cuts of $73 billion could be achieved by canceling ill-conceived and ineffective weapons programs, and by reducing administrative inefficiencies. However, to accomplish this would require reining in defense industry lobbyists.

It may be time to do that anyway. Our 2019 military budget exceeded the next 10 countries defense budgets combined. It was nearly three times larger that China’s and 10 times larger than Russia’s. According to a Brown University Watson Institute study, between 2018-2020 the United States had counterterrorism operations in 85 countries. These ranged from on-the-ground combat troops to drone assassinations.

In 2018 and 2020, the Defense Department failed its first two audits, continued to produce faulty weapons systems and programs with cost overruns, and remains one of the world’s largest institutional polluters.

My estimate is that defense industry jobs are 3 percent of private sector nonfarm jobs in Connecticut. Reducing military spending will cause short term (three to five year) adjustment discomfort. However, the long-term impact would be absorbed by growth in other sectors of the state’s economy.

If current military spending reductions are done in the context of job creation in new public infrastructure, green industries, health care security, free community college education, equal racial and gender opportunity, and an economic policy that fosters the dignity of work for all, the adjustment discomfort will be shortlived and part of a general societal effort for economic justice. For example, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection’s 2018 Comprehensive Energy Strategy is full of concrete proposals and ways the state is already aiding the growth of the “greening” of industry. Connecticut’s Green Bank already participated in the creation of 13,000 new green energy jobs.

Perhaps the most serious challenges to reducing military spending are a frozen sense of reality and an unwillingness to question cultural values. First the reality check: In 1960 the United States produced 40 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. In 2018 it was 24 percent. The global economy has changed dramatically in the last 60 years. We no longer are the singular global economic power as we were at the height of the Cold War.

As for values, we have a sense of American Exceptionalism. We are rightly proud of our nation. However, this does not give us the right to tell other nations what they are supposed to do, and to enforce that with a threat of violence. As Martin Luther King said in his speech “Beyond Vietnam”: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

With our American resourcefulness, we have available to us concrete ways to move our society forward. Do we have the courage and will to do the hard work of making them real? Is this time to “Move the Money”?

Getty Images U.S. Marines pivot into position during an exercise on the flight deck of the amphibious transport dock ship USS San Antonio in 2013.