President Obama has already ruled out any cuts in defense spending while we occupy Iraq and Afghanistan. This has not stopped the musings in the liberal blogosphere by the likes of Matt Yglesias, and others who have noted that the annual defense budget is $680 billion and the cost of health care is on pace to be less than $90 billion. the annual defense expenditure would be just under 7 times the cost of health care. Aside from wondering why we dont talk about the cost of health care in annual expenditures in stead of over 10 years, it really makes you wonder what we are getting from all of this.
The clear answer is: not enough. The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exceed the cost of providing health care in this country. It is impossible to argue that the wars in iraq and afghanistan have not seriously harmed this country domestically. Kevin Drum pointed to this handy chart from the CRS,
Several reports, like this one(pdf), have delved into the effects of spending just small portions of the defense budget elsewhere and what we would get for that. The report linked to explored the job creation benefits of allocating 1 billion dollars to other fields like education, health care, tax cuts. Not surprisingly it found that spending in areas other than defense created more jobs and ultimately benefited the country more. Even tax cuts created more jobs than defense spending on a per dollar basis.
Ryan Avent mused about the effects of allocating all defense spending to infrastructure,
What if? Well, this year, that would mean devoting $680 billion to investments in infrastructure. That’s more than $200 billion more than Oberstar’s entire proposed transportation reauthorization bill, which was itself a large increase over the previous transportation law. There’s probably no way we could spend all that money at once, but it would nicely capitalize an infrastructure bank, and the promise of a steady flow of funds would get states thinking about real, long-term investments.
With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that. Which makes one wonder: where are all the economists, wringing their hands over cost-benefit analyses of these defense expenditures? Does anyone doubt that the net benefit of $100 billion spent on high-speed rail is easily higher than that for the last $100 billion spent on defense? Have a look at this if you’re unsure.
And while the gains to new investments in infrastructure (and not just in transportation) would be large, it isn’t as though we lack critical needs. What was the cost, human and economic, of the I-35 bridge collapse? Of the Metro crash and resulting limitations on service? Of the Bay Bridge shutdown? And of course, investments in infrastructure constitute positive contributions to the economy, which ultimately strengthen our ability to direct resources toward defense. Aimless defense spending, on the other hand, may well make us poorer and less secure.
Yglesias responded to this with a post on the erosion of hegemony based on wasted defense money. I agree. Part of making your country strong is ensuring that the infrastructure and education, the foundation, are strong. Instead of updating the foundation of our country we have been blowing the money in foriegn entanglements. When Obama was running for President it was a tag line of his that we should be spending the money that went out the window to iraq here at home. In office he hasnt done much to make this the case.
Sadly the ability of our country to seriously address this issue is non existent. The teabag party would go absolutely insane if there were any suggestion that the military shouldn't receive all of the money in america for whatever they want to do. Obama will not touch this issue. Congress wont touch this issue. Rest assured that even though the media and Congress are screaming about the budget deficit the notion that we might cut some defense spending is a black swan, something they cant even conceive of.
Just take a minute though to imagine all of the really cool things we could do in america with even a quarter of the defense budget, like build a hsr line from disney world to las vegas.