Apparently the thing we need to keep ourselves safe is a fast, lightweight ship that can sweep mines, launch helicopters, fight submarines, and perform other assorted duties -- but can't withstand heavy combat. I don't claim to know if we really need the Littoral Combat Ship to ensure our national security. According to an article in the Times, John McCain -- the Republican Party's last presidential nominee and one of the Navy's more famous veterans -- is critical, although other Republicans and the administration are in favor of it.
I do know that the Littoral Combat Ship is a classic example of why it's so hard to reduce budget deficits. You have local politicians who want the jobs. You have a large group of representatives who are reflexively pro-military and will vote for anything the Pentagon wants, and even things the Pentagon doesn't want. (You have Mitt Romney, who bemoans the fact that the Navy has only 285 ships, the fewest since 1917. Would he rather have the Royal Navy of 1812, which had 1,000 ships, or our navy, with eleven aircraft carrier groups -- while no other country has more than one?) You have a procurement and development process that stretches on for years so that even when a weapons system turns out to be a dud, it has to be kept alive because it's too big to fail -- there is no other alternative. Both the Center for American Progress and the Project on Governmental Oversight have recommended cutbacks in the Littoral program. Yet there is no practical way to check its momentum.
An even better example is the V-22 Osprey vertical-takeoff plane, which the Times profiled late last year. Even renowned insider Dick Cheney opposed the Osprey when he was Secretary of Defense, to no avail. Not only CAP and the Project on Governmental Oversight called for Osprey cutbacks, but so did Simpson-Bowles and the arch-conservative (and generally principled) Senator Tom Coburn. In short, just about anyone who cares about the budget wants to cut back on the Osprey. Will it happen? Well, the Paul Ryan budget reverses the automatic defense spending cuts, so we know what he thinks about it. And I'm sure the Osprey has plenty of fans in the administration and the Democratic caucus as well.
In the end, defense spending plays out the same way as Social Security. If you want to reduce government spending, you obviously have to reduce defense spending: it's basically the second biggest part of the budget after Social Security. But it's almost impossible to cut any actual defense spending. Apparently politicians don't realize that a whole is equal to the sum of its parts. Or they do realize it, and they hope that we don't.
One of our core political problems, as we discuss in White House Burning, is that it pays for politicians to take noisy stands against the whole while protecting (or increasing) each individual part. It seems so easy to get away with it -- why would they ever stop?
James Kwak is the co-author of White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters To You, available from April 3rd. This post is cross-posted from The Baseline Scenario. Read more from the Fiscal Affairs series here.
Follow James Kwak on Twitter: www.twitter.com/baselinescene
"In the end, defense spending plays out the same way as Social Security."
This is guilt by association, and quite frankly beneath an honest intellectual discussion. The author should know the difference between the two in terms of the manner of appropriation of funds, long term and short term degrees of stability, impact on economy, etc. There are many good economists that argue that Social Security is not in trouble, some presenting their views on this site periodically. If Mr. Kwak disagrees with their assessments, he should present his views in a straightforward manner with detailed arguments.
Pentagon Wars - Bradley Fighting Vehicle Evolution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA
Social security is paid into directly from payroll deductions, its a worker funded insurance program. The DOD isn't. Comparing the two is apples and oranges. The Military budget is increasingly like the old adage about marketing budgets: I know half of my marketing budget is wasted, I just cannot tell which half. What's worse, the veil of secrecy can be (often dubiously) claimed for many of them making public accountability very, very hard to maintain. A sure lure to crooks and cons in any day and age. And by that I mean mostly civilian contractors, their lobbyists and the Congressman that love them, as most military personel I know complain and point up examples of massive taxpayer DOD waste all the time.
"Let's nationalize the defense industry. We own it anyway."
"Affluent Society??" Maybe.
Our military budget - which has tripled since 1997 (nothing like Social Security) - and of which the last two wars started by a GOP president - was not EVEN INCLUDED IN THE BUDGET - is now greater than all other nation's on earth COMBINED. Our military budget - unlike our Social Security - is the #1 cause we Americans are in a huge debt crisis. Social Security has not added one dime to our debt.
I find this blog post disconcerting and there is a kind of implication by association - being deliberately manufactured here that IMO is a falsehood.
It seems that this has been an ongoing "cash cow" for a lot of Federal programs.
For years it was considered unpatriotic to question "Defense" expenditures, now I seem to detect an understanding of just what this has cost. Great idea, the Superpower deduction.
Really.
He's a nobody.
Perpetual peace is beneficial to the infrastructures, small business and social programs for the people.
It all comes down to what and who your tax money is spent on.
It is time to start differentiating between economic activity that generates needed goods and services and economic activity that does not. Bridges to nowhere will take us... nowhere. If government wants to remain in the business of spending trillions of dollars to boost GDP, it should stop pissing that money away and go into the business of making something useful - preferably something that other countries will import, so we can reduce our trillion-dollar trade deficit.
"GDP does not, and cannot, reflect the waste of enormous effort, and precious natural resources, that went into building something that suddenly no one wants. Yes, all of the malinvestment made GDP soar, but ultimately just wasted capital."
http://mises.org/daily/3843
The irony of endless military "defense" spending is that it directly contributes to the only imminent threat this county faces, one that we need urgently to defend against: the demise of our currency. Sadly, we're trying to defend dollar hegemony by military force, which will only serve to bring sudden collapse rather than gradual transition.
It could easily be argued that education or infrastructure spending would have better long-term results.