Since the deficit committee officially failed to produce a plan as of last week, expect the war profiteer spin to hit the fan. Here's an early warning of what to expect, courtesy of Reuters last week:
Failure of a special congressional committee to strike a deficit-reduction deal is expected to unleash desperate lobbying by U.S. arms makers to get lawmakers to block $600 billion in automatic cuts.Their weapon of choice: jobs.
But, don't expect the truth to get in the way of a good propaganda campaign.
The profiteer's agitprop push is already underway. Searching for "defense cuts" on Google early this morning already brings up articles high in the search feed from paid war-industry shills in the top results, notably a lengthy piece from Loren Thompson, perennial paid defender of massive military budgets (himself on the war industry dime). His argument, that Obama could lose the election due to job losses from military cuts, is one you better get used to seeing.
This argument is part of a coordinated effort headed by war industry CEOs and their advocates on Capitol Hill to push elected officials to protect the massive, corruption-filled war budget by slashing social safety nets. This would be a disaster for our economy. As we show in our latest War Costs video, military spending costs jobs compared to other ways of spending the money, and Congress must cut this spending if we are to get out of this unemployment crisis.
Massive Military Budgets Cost Jobs
"If we're really serious about building anything approximate to a full employment economy, or at least getting us out of the damn recession, the best thing to do is to start cutting the military."
Robert Pollin is the co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He and his colleague, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, are working on a new update to an employment study that discusses the jobs impact of various kinds of government spending. PERI has a strong message for elected officials: if you are going to cut, cut the Pentagon budget.
Brave New Foundation's War Costs project spoke with Pollin and other experts several times over the past several weeks as press reports indicated a disposition among the many elected officials to spare the Pentagon from the cuts required to the budget by the debt ceiling law. The consensus of these experts -- as opposed to those funded heavily by military money and war profiteers -- is that the U.S.'s massive military budgets are terrible for job creation, and that the talking points coming from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the war-profiteer front campaign, "Second To None," are specious propaganda.
PERI's study uses Department of Commerce data to determine how many people are employed by various kinds of spending, including military, health care, green energy and education. They also examine the employment effects of basic consumer spending. Their discoveries, validated repeatedly as they've updated the study every two years since the original study in 2007, might startle those who bought the Washington consensus on military spending. In short, among the kinds of spending examined, military spending actually costs jobs compared to any other form. It's the only spending that scored worse than basic consumer spending, and it created far less than half the jobs created by education spending.
Here are the numbers from their latest available study (.pdf):
Job Creation Per $1 Billion Spent:
And, according to some experts, the actual jobs costs of massive military budgets over the past several decades could be in the millions.
Dr. Lloyd Dumas is a professor of Political Economy, Economics and Public Policy at the University of Texas Dallas and the author of The Peacekeeping Economy. His new book features an extended discussion of what makes manufacturing firms competitive: investment in research and development to develop new tools and techniques to increase product quality, production efficiency and to develop new technologies. He says the massive military budgets of recent years, especially the massive R&D budgets at the Pentagon, have severely undermined this process in the civilian manufacturing sector in the U.S. by luring scientists and engineers out of civilian R&D and into military programs.
Large military budgets are very bad for job creation especially in the long run, and actually responsible in my view for much of the loss of American industrial jobs... that's a job killer. ... As a matter of fact, cutting defense spending is absolutely crucial to revitalizing American industry and creating millions of jobs that we've already lost -- getting them back and getting more on top of that."
For decades we've seen how investments in military aerospace endeavors lead to breakthroughs that benefit all of us -- the Internet and GPS that grew out of DARPA research come to mind.
Despite the fact that economic data clearly suggest that military spending is a terrible priority for a government supposedly concerned with job creation, and despite the negative effect of this spending on the United States' long-term competitiveness in the world market, an astounding number of representatives in Congress, Pentagon officials and war industry executives want to protect the military budget from cuts. Even worse, they are trying to wrap their campaign in the one word that certainly should not be applied to military spending: jobs. Add a healthy dose of fear-mongering about security into the mix, and you have a killer message campaign run largely with taxpayer dollars to protect war industry revenues.
The Fear Campaign
War industry CEOs have allies all over Capitol Hill pushing Congress and the administration to protect the bloated military budget from cuts.
For example, House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) recently sent a high-temperature letter to the deficit committee, including the mind-blowing assertion that less military spending will result in longer wars -- irrespective of the fact that we're spending all this money on the longest war in U.S. history in Afghanistan. He's continued his agitation after the committee's failure, which isn't all that surprising considering his massive campaign cash take from the war industry.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has filled the airwaves in recent weeks with sky-is-falling rhetoric, which last week included a flat-out declaration that he sees protecting the business interests of the military contractors as part of his job.
McKeon and Panetta have both included in their scare-mongering the theme that cuts to the military budget would "hollow out" the military. Of course, they always fail to mention that the Pentagon's budget would only be drawn down to roughly 2007 topline number for the military budget (which, by the way, McKeon enthusiastically voted for -- twice), after which it would resume growing again.
The real lipstick that McKeon, Panetta and others put on their propaganda pig, however, is the jobs fiction cooked up by the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), a "nonprofit" governed by executives from the major military contractor organizations which advocates for their businesses on Capitol Hill. AIA paid Dr. Steven Fuller from George Mason University to write a paper about job losses that would occur if sequestration -- the across-the-board cuts triggered by deficit committee failure -- took place. Fuller's estimate checked in at roughly 1 million jobs.
Pollin, however, takes strong issue with AIA's methods in the debate, pointing to their study's total lack of context.
The real point is to compare the relative employment impacts of military spending versus spending on domestic infrastructure, on the green economy, on health care and on education. ... It is fair to say that every time we take money out of these alternatives, it is costing the economy jobs by putting money into the military.
To me there's no question that this scare campaign about jobs by the Pentagon and the industry is a propaganda campaign. And the reason I say that is, first of all, it's coordinated. So for example, one day an executive from the Aerospace Industries Association says we're going to increase unemployment 1 percent if we make significant cuts in military spending. The next day, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta calls congress and says, 'Guess what? We're going to gain 1 percent in unemployment if we make significant cuts in military spending.' So they've obviously sat down and gotten their stories straight. They're working shoulder-to-shoulder to scare people into spending more on the military than we need."
Right now, Congress and the administration are the target of a coordinated propaganda campaign involving war industry allies in Congress and the administration, funded in large part by huge corporations whose executives rely on the taxpayer for lavish lifestyles. This spin campaign flies in the face of what economists know to be true: that military spending costs jobs compared to other ways of spending the money. If Congress acts on the "information" they've obtained during this propaganda push, there's a real chance they will protect the worst kind of spending for job creation -- the military budget -- by slashing other kinds of spending that create far more jobs. This would be a disastrous decision that would prolong and deepen our economic woes.
We've got to push back with the truth: military spending costs jobs compared to other ways of spending the money.
In response to this propaganda campaign from the war industry and their allies, Brave New Foundation's War Costs campaign has launched our own effort to break through to Washington, D.C. with the truth. We have set up a tool that includes a new video about the job-killing impact of war spending, targeted at your elected officials. Please use it today and let them know that you want Congress to make real cuts to the war budget to save our economy.
The clock may have run out on the deficit committee, but the real fight to cut job-killing Pentagon budgets is just beginning, and we need your help. Please watch our latest video and send it to your elected officials today.
Join the War Costs campaign on Facebook, and follow Robert Greenwald and Derrick Crowe on Twitter.
Having said that, two observations stand out:
1. If we spend more than most of the rest of the world combined, something is wrong about what we are doing and how we are doing it.
2. Money spent on the military (other than its value to security) is mostly money burned up. Wasted. Yes, there is a net 'training' effect on improving skills of young people who might otherwise be unemployed, but the physical instantiation of a tank or a plane is money burned up, if it isn't used. That same amount of money spent to build a bridge, say, provides something useful that helps the economy grow, so there is a multiplier effect. Making guns does not provide such a multiplier.
Semper fi
Semper fi
As long as you got yours, huh?
Semepr fi
Semper fi
In the 50s corporations discovered the concept of "built in obsolescence". They manufactured defects into products so they'd wear out and the customer would have to pay again for repair or repurchase. Razors and razor blades; printers and printer ink; the money is made on the consumables. Bombs, bullets and weapons of war are the ultimate consumable - use once, if at all.
"Demand creation" is so easy in the defense industry. To mobilize the citizenry, make them want your weapons, you just scream "Boogeyman, boogeyman" for some value of "boogeyman" - Muslim, communist, Chinese, pick one. Mobilizing the purchaser (legislators) is easy. Let them beat the drum and look tough. They buying decision is kept outside the cerebrum and in the limbic system.
"Regulation" is non-existent, accounting is absent, and accountability nowhere to be found. Most of the business for the MIC is conducted overseas, where oversight is thin to none. Payment is delivered as pallets of money, without controls. Graft is rampant, with partners and citizens in that supply chain.
Once you're lined up at the trough, feeding is easy and plentiful. The problem is that the pigs are never butchered, just fed, and fattened until they eat us out of house and home.
Semper fi
What I hate most about these cuts is that they target the middle and lower class. The Democrats gave up the moral high ground and turned this into an ideological fight by demanding military cuts. The trigger should've been a tax hike on the rich. This wouldn't have hurt the middle and lower class as much.
http://www.strategypage.com/index.xml
http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/resultoutput/trends/recent_trends_default
Iran is threatening to send warships to the east coast of the US and is working on new cruise misiles and nuclear weapons. And the worldwide economy is in failure, especially in Europe. It was the economic failure of Germany after the Treaty of Versailles that led to the Great Depression , and the Depression combined with the US and other countries cutting their military budgets that led to the 2nd World War.
But the Left never learns. Now they want to repeat the mistakes that led to World War 2, and will lead to World War 3. Let's not confuse jobs and defense, they are two different things. While jobs are important, we cannot afford to give up our defense. Without the ability to defend ourselves, we won't need any jobs. There won't be any Americans left to work the jobs we do have. We have enemies that will see to that.
Semper fi
Actually, what we spend is irrelevent when we consider the difference in prices between the major military powers. China has the largest military if we look at manpower, followed by the US and then Russia. We have the best technology, but Russia and China are close behind and gaining all the time. We can also consider that Russia and China, in spite of their supposed dislike of each other, are training together for a fight against the US.
The "military disparity" isn't exactly realistic. Our greatest enemies are pretty much equal to us in terms of military power, and combined they exceed us in military power.
End the wars and bring the troops home.
Cut the defense budget.
End the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
Create a financial transaction tax so that those banks that created this mess can help pay for it.
Implement a national sales tax with a credit for low and moderate incomes. That would tax the under ground and cash based economy that does not now pay taxes. Too many of those "job creators" skim cash from their businesses and do not pay their taxes. A national sales tax would tax that income when they go to buy a second home, car, boat or other luxury item. We need to close the loop holes.
CBO released a new report (on the DL mind you), saying it created about 700,000 jobs and grew the GDP less than 1%.
Thats roughly $1.18M per job!
Its bad spending all the way around!
How?
If it was spent to 'buy' something, someone, somewhere had to produce that something. That's what GDP is.
A reasonable assumption is that if the money was actually spent on something (a bridge, a teacher, a firefighter, a building, etc.) that money flows through the economy in a 'normal' fashion after that money is spent. People get paid, then spend it, saving part of it, which is then available to investment, which gets spent, which pays people, etc.
The average GDP per capita is over $48K.
($825/stimulus)/($48K/job) = 17.2Mjobs/stimulus
I'm sure the CBO is smart enough to understand that. I suspect that a lot of the stimulus simply prevented a much deeper freefall in jobs and GDP. But that is still stimulus (and doing exactly what it was intended to do, I might add).
That tells me that we need to be REALLY, REALLY THANKFUL THAT WE HAD THAT STIMULUS, if the net increase in jobs was only 700K!
Yes, this whole mindless "you're a hero"/verbal handjob to every member in the military is a pretty clever ploy on the part of the MIC et al.
Just remember they fight for your freedom to be able to say that! They fight to give women the chance who live in oppressed countries. The taliban may not want us in those countries, but there are people who are happy we are! Its not black and white like you think! Our military actually helps builds schools, drill wells, gives medical care to those people! They distribute food! Yes they are do nothing and are completely horrible people!
It's time to stop getting economic advice fron Bush republican'ts. They got us into this mess and they are offering nothing new or different than their same failed policies they served up under Bush, all the while complaining about the guy successfully cleaning up Bushes mess. The American people need to tune their lies out and follow their common sense. Republicants used the filibuster in 3 years more than it was used on any 2 term President and will continue this foolishness, given the chance. They freely admit to sabatoging the economy for political gain. We need to vote out as many obstructing republicant's and like minded blue dogs in 2012 and finally get this country back to work.