For the first time in a decade, significant cuts in projected military spending are on the table. If the "Super Congress" doesn't reach a deal on $1.2 trillion in debt reduction over the next ten years by Thanksgiving, $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts will be triggered, half of which must come from the military; and if the Super Congress does reach a deal, the prospects are good that cuts in projected military spending will be a significant part of the story.
Obviously, however, the prospect of significant military cuts has well-heeled opponents. The military-industrial-Congressional-lobbyist-think tank-corporate media complex is not just going to roll over and play dead. In the next three months, we can expect a steady stream of pro-military-spending propaganda. Expect to hear a lot about China, Iran, North Korea and "global terrorism" as the beneficiaries of the military-industrial complex try to justify why we must continue to spend much more on the military than we did while opposing the Soviet Union during the cold war.
But another argument against cuts to projected military spending is sure to rear its ugly head: we shouldn't cut military spending, because that would cost American jobs.
In the current political context, this "jobs" argument is 100 percent nonsense. Here's why.
The (first-order) Keynesian economics story for government spending to boost employment has three basic elements:
- The economy is not always at full employment. Sometimes, there are a significant number of people who are "involuntarily unemployed" - they would like to work for the prevailing wage but cannot find a job.
- When this situation occurs, it is not automatically self-correcting over a time horizon that most people are willing to tolerate. The economy can remain at much less than full employment for years.
- There's something that the government can and should do to address this situation: engage in deficit spending to boost aggregate demand and put people back to work.
There are three important things to remember about this story:
2 comments:
And after "aggregate demand" falls, because the government cannot spend, or stimulate, in perpetuity, what happens to all those jobs, and how do the taxpayers get their money back...remember how the "stimulus' created so many jobs last time?? It would have been better just to send those newly employed workers a check for $50,000 than to have spent $185,000 to "create" the job. And pay them the salary, too. And how many of those "created" jobs are still here?
Leave the damn military alone jackasses. Stop weakening our defenses and make cuts that are more meaningful and actually amount to something.
Cutting aid to foreign countries would be a start. Charging for the use of our military would bring in some revenue.
Stop any new spending. Stop borrowing.
I wonder what would happen if we disbanded some gov agencies like the DEA and legalized drugs?
The U.S. is the worlds largest consumer of cocaine and the center for money laundering. We are fighting a 'war' against ourselves.
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