[Peace-discuss] "Congress funds wars while pretending it has no choice"

[C. G. Estabrook]

"The European Union (EU) is the world's largest and most competitive economy, 
and most of those living in it are wealthier, healthier, and happier than most 
Americans. Europeans work shorter hours, have a greater say in how their 
employers behave, receive lengthy paid vacations and paid parental leave, can 
rely on guaranteed paid pensions, have free or extremely inexpensive 
comprehensive and preventative healthcare, enjoy free or extremely inexpensive 
educations from preschool through college, impose only half the per-capita 
environmental damage of Americans, endure a fraction of the violence found in 
the United States, imprison a fraction of the prisoners locked up here, and 
benefit from democratic representation, engagement, and civil liberties 
unimagined in the land where we're teased that the world hates us for our rather 
mediocre 'freedoms'..."


It's Jobs or Wars, Not Both
Posted on 01 November 2010
By David Swanson

The Washington Post's David Broder thinks more war will bring us more jobs. 
Unlike in Germany, where the president was forced out of office earlier this 
year for suggesting that war in Afghanistan could benefit the German economy, 
Americans don't seem to have serious moral qualms about slaughtering human 
beings for no good reason. We've got three significant wars and a variety of 
secretive military actions going on now without the slightest mention in our 
elections. A majority of Americans tell pollsters that the wars should end, but 
virtually no one tells candidates. However, one has to assume -- for the sake of 
one's own sanity -- that even Americans, if they knew, would seriously object to 
further damaging our economy through war and allowing people like David Broder 
to paper over that process with demonstrably false claims.

Contrary to partisan myths and stereotypes, U.S. military spending has been on 
the rise these past two years. And military towns have seen a boom this past 
decade. But spending money on the military, even in the United States, hurts the 
U.S. economy. Spending money on foreign wars is even worse, but all military 
spending is economically destructive. It's worse, economically, than doing 
nothing. Failing to spend that money and instead cutting taxes would create more 
jobs than investing it in the military. Investing it in useful industries like 
mass transit or education would have a much stronger impact and create many more 
jobs. But even nothing, even cutting taxes, would do less harm than military 
spending. And that's domestic military spending; spending on foreign wars, 
funding the Taliban, funding Karzai, misplacing $17 billion, etc., all does even 
more economic harm.

Yes, harm. Every military job, every weapons industry job, every 
war-reconstruction job, every mercenary or torture consultant job is as much a 
lie as any war justification. It appears to be a job, but it is not a job. It is 
the absence of more and better jobs. It is public money wasted on something 
worse for job creation than nothing at all and much worse than other available 
options.

Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier, of the Political Economy Research 
Institute, have collected the data. Each billion dollars of government spending 
invested in the military creates about 12,000 jobs. Investing it instead in tax 
cuts for personal consumption generates approximately 15,000 jobs. But putting 
it into healthcare gives us 18,000 jobs, in home weatherization and 
infrastructure also 18,000 jobs, in education 25,000 jobs, and in mass transit 
27,700 jobs. In education the average wages and benefits of the 25,000 jobs 
created is significantly higher than that of the military's 12,000 jobs. In the 
other fields, the average wages and benefits created are lower than in the 
military (at least as long as only financial benefits are considered), but the 
net impact on the economy is greater due to the greater number of jobs. The 
option of cutting taxes does not have a larger net impact, but it does create 
3,000 more jobs per billion dollars.

There is a common belief that World War II spending ended the Great Depression. 
That seems very far from clear, and economists are not in agreement on it. What 
I think we can say with some confidence is, first, that the military spending of 
World War II at the very least did not prevent recovery from the Great 
Depression, and second, that similar levels of spending on other industries 
would very likely have improved that recovery.

We would have more jobs and they would pay more, and we would be more 
intelligent and peaceful if we invested in education rather than war. But does 
that prove that military spending is destroying our economy? Well, consider this 
lesson from post-war history. If you had that higher paying education job rather 
than the lower paying military job or no job at all, your kids could have the 
free quality education that your job and your colleagues' jobs provided. If we 
didn't dump over half of our discretionary government spending into war, we 
could have free quality education from preschool through college. We could have 
several life-changing amenities, including paid retirements, vacations, parental 
leave, healthcare, and transportation. We could have guaranteed employment. 
You'd be making more money, working fewer hours, with greatly reduced expenses. 
How can I be so sure this is possible? Because I know a secret that is often 
kept from us by American media: there are other nations on this planet.

Steven Hill's new book "Europe's Promise: Why the European Way Is the Best Hope 
in an Insecure Age" has a message we should find very encouraging. The European 
Union (EU) is the world's largest and most competitive economy, and most of 
those living in it are wealthier, healthier, and happier than most Americans. 
Europeans work shorter hours, have a greater say in how their employers behave, 
receive lengthy paid vacations and paid parental leave, can rely on guaranteed 
paid pensions, have free or extremely inexpensive comprehensive and preventative 
healthcare, enjoy free or extremely inexpensive educations from preschool 
through college, impose only half the per-capita environmental damage of 
Americans, endure a fraction of the violence found in the United States, 
imprison a fraction of the prisoners locked up here, and benefit from democratic 
representation, engagement, and civil liberties unimagined in the land where 
we're teased that the world hates us for our rather mediocre "freedoms." Europe 
even offers a model foreign policy, bringing neighboring nations toward 
democracy by holding out the prospect of EU membership, while we drive other 
nations away from good governance at great expense of blood and treasure.

Of course, this would all be good news, if not for the extreme and horrible 
danger of higher taxes! Working less and living longer with less illness, a 
cleaner environment, a better education, more cultural enjoyments, paid 
vacations, and governments that respond better to the public — that all sounds 
nice, but the reality involves the ultimate evil of higher taxes! Or does it?

As Hill points out, Europeans do pay higher income taxes, but they generally pay 
lower state, local, property, and social security taxes. They also pay those 
higher income taxes out of a larger paycheck. And what Europeans keep in earned 
income they do not have to spend on healthcare or college or job training or 
numerous other expenses that are hardly optional but that we seem intent on 
celebrating our privilege to pay for individually.

If we pay roughly as much as Europeans in taxes, why do we additionally have to 
pay for everything we need on our own? Why don't our taxes pay for our needs? 
The primary reason is that so much of our tax money goes to wars and the military.

We also funnel it to the wealthiest among us through corporate tax breaks and 
bailouts. And our solutions to human needs like healthcare are incredibly 
inefficient. In a given year, our government gives roughly $300 billion in tax 
breaks to businesses for their employee health benefits. That's enough to 
actually pay for everyone in this country to have healthcare, but it's just a 
fraction of what we dump into the for-profit healthcare system that, as its name 
suggests, exists primarily to generate profits. Most of what we waste on this 
madness does not go through the government, a fact of which we are inordinately 
proud.

We are also proud, however, of shoveling huge piles of cash through the 
government and into the military industrial complex. And that is the most 
glaring difference between us and Europe. But this reflects more of a difference 
between our governments than between our peoples. Americans, in polls and 
surveys, would prefer to move much of our money from the military to human 
needs. The problem is primarily that our views are not represented in our 
government, as this anecdote from Europe's Promise suggests:

"A few years ago, an American acquaintance of mine who lives in Sweden told me 
that he and his Swedish wife were in New York City and, quite by chance, ended 
up sharing a limousine to the theatre district with then-U.S. Senator John 
Breaux from Louisiana and his wife. Breaux, a conservative, anti-tax Democrat, 
asked my acquaintance about Sweden and swaggeringly commented about 'all those 
taxes the Swedes pay,' to which this American replied, 'The problem with 
Americans and their taxes is that we get nothing for them.' He then went on to 
tell Breaux about the comprehensive level of services and benefits that Swedes 
receive in return for their taxes. 'If Americans knew what Swedes receive for 
their taxes, we would probably riot,' he told the senator. The rest of the ride 
to the theater district was unsurprisingly quiet."

Now, if you consider debt meaningless and are not troubled by borrowing 
trillions of dollars, then cutting the military and enlarging education and 
other useful programs are two separate topics. You could be persuaded on one but 
not the other. However, the argument used in Washington, D.C., against greater 
spending on human needs usually focuses on the supposed lack of money and the 
need for a balanced budget. Given this political dynamic, whether or not you 
think a balanced budget is helpful in itself, wars and domestic issues are 
inseparable. The money is coming from the same pot, and we have to choose 
whether to spend it here or there. As the Washington Post tries to sell us 
another war, you will see the same Washington Post push cuts to Social Security.

Earlier this year, Rethink Afghanistan created a tool on FaceBook that allows 
you to re-spend, as you see fit, the trillion dollars in tax money that had, by 
that point, been spent on the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. I clicked to add 
various items to my "shopping cart" and then checked to see what I'd acquired. I 
was able to hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year at $12 billion, build 3 
million affordable housing units in the United States for $387 billion, and 
provide healthcare for a million average Americans for $3.4 billion and for a 
million children for $2.3 billion.

Still within the $1 trillion limit, I managed to also hire a million music/arts 
teachers for a year for $58.5 billion, and a million elementary school teachers 
for a year for $61.1 billion. I also placed a million kids in Head Start for a 
year for $7.3 billion. Then I gave 10 million students a one-year university 
scholarship for $79 billion. Finally, I decided to provide 5 million residences 
with renewable energy for $4.8 billion. Convinced I'd exceeding my spending 
limit, I proceeded to the shopping cart, only to be advised:

"You still have $384.5 billion to spare." Geez. What are we going to do with that?

A trillion dollars sure does go a long way when you don't have to kill anybody. 
And yet a trillion dollars was merely the direct cost of those two wars up to 
that point. On September 5th economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes 
published a column in the Washington Post, building on their earlier book of a 
similar title, "The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 Trillion and Beyond." The 
authors argued that their estimate of $3 trillion for just the War on Iraq, 
first published in 2008, was probably low. Their calculation of the total cost 
of that war included the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled 
veterans, which by 2010 was higher than they had expected. And that was the 
least of it:

"Two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what 
may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of 
'might have beens,' or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, 
many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be 
stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only 'what if' worth contemplating. We 
might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so 
rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been 
so severe?

"The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of 
economics is that resources — including both money and attention — are scarce."

That lesson has not penetrated Capitol Hill, where Congress repeatedly chooses 
to fund wars while pretending it has no choice.

On June 22nd House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer spoke in a large private room at 
Union Station in Washington, D.C. and took questions. He had no answers for the 
questions I put to him.

Hoyer's topic was fiscal responsibility, and he said that his proposals — which 
were all pure vagueness — would be appropriate to enact "as soon as the economy 
is fully recovered." I'm not sure when that was expected.

Hoyer, as is the custom, bragged about cutting and trying to cut particular 
weapons systems. So I asked him how he could have neglected to mention two 
closely related points. First, he and his colleagues had been increasing the 
overall military budget each year. Second, he was working to fund the escalation 
of the war in Afghanistan with a "supplemental" bill that kept the expenses off 
the books, outside the budget.

Hoyer replied that all such issues should be "on the table." But he did not 
explain his failure to put them there or suggest how he would act on them. None 
of the assembled Washington press corpse (sic) followed up.

Two other people asked good questions about why in the world Hoyer would want to 
go after Social Security or Medicare. One guy asked why we couldn't go after 
Wall Street instead. Hoyer mumbled about passing regulatory reform, and blamed Bush.

Hoyer repeatedly deferred to President Obama. In fact, he said that if the 
president's commission on the deficit (a commission apparently designed to 
propose cuts to Social Security, a commission commonly referred to as the 
"catfood commission" for what it may reduce our senior citizens to consuming for 
dinner) produced any recommendations, and if the Senate passed them, then he and 
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would put them on the floor for a vote — no matter 
what they might be.

In fact, shortly after this event, the House passed a rule putting in place the 
requirement that it vote on any catfood commission measures passed by the Senate.

Later Hoyer informed us that only a president can stop spending. I spoke up and 
asked him "If you don't pass it, how does the President sign it?" The Majority 
Leader stared back at me like a deer in the headlights. He said nothing.

There are 115 incumbents and 99 challengers who will stop funding wars, and many 
more who will not. But how many Washington DC-area liberals will ever stop 
funding David Broder?

David Swanson is author of the forthcoming book "War Is A Lie," 
http://warisalie.org