Orwellian math

Only in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of government spending would a 10 percent increase be deplored as a “cut.” And not merely a “cut” — a “devastating cut.” A “draconian cut.” A “calamitous cut.” And most descriptive of all, a “castrating cut.” Various Washington pooh-bahs have used these adjectives to warn what will befall military spending if Democrats and Republicans fail to reach a budgetary compromise by New Year’s Day, 2013. If no compromise is reached by then, automatic preset spending “cuts” across the board, including military, will kick in under a “sequestration” arrangement. America will go over “the fiscal cliff,” as it’s said. (Higher, pre-Bush level income tax rates also are set to kick in the absence of congressional action.)

Dramatically drastic spending reductions aren’t really likely to happen, actually. But if they should happen, here’s the result regarding “calamitous” military cuts, according to Veronique de Rugy, an economist at George Mason U. who specializes in separating the chaff of political propaganda from the wheat of government-spending data: Military spending over the period 2013-2021 in this dire scenario would total $4.8 trillion.

And that’s 10 percent MORE than current levels of baseline military spending, she writes in Reason magazine, a journal of libertarian bent. Now hold on here! Ten percent MORE spending is a “castrating cut”? According to the Orwellian math of government spending, yes. More is less. The 10 percent more, you see, is 10 percent less than the hoped-for increase the Pentagon is projecting. (The same math is resorted to in the hysterical political doomsaying over Medicare “cuts.”)

So the positions of the two big party candidates might be summed up thus: President Obama would spend more on the Pentagon and Mitt Romney would spend a lot more.

Besides providing for national defense, military spending may be viewed as a form of economic stimulus. Consider just this partial roster of big corporate defense contractors: GE, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, United Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Gruman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. With plants spread out across congressional districts from East Coast to West Coast, from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, these companies alone employ nearly 1.5 million workers.

Is this the “military-industrial complex” that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, the heroic general of World War II, tried to warn us about upon departing the White House? De Rugy notes that the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates America’s 2010 military spending at 45 percent of the world’s total military spending.

That’s greater than the world’s next 14 largest military budgets combined (most of which are the budgets of U.S. allies) and six times greater than China’s military spending.

Yes, military spending finances national defense, and national defense is not the place to be penny wise and pound foolish. But isn’t it worth ruminating on how much military spending actually provides national defense and how much it tempts the government into meddlesome follies overseas?