The checkbook is empty

Chalmers Johnson, a retired professor of Asian studies at the University of California and former consultant to the Office of National Estimates of the CIA, has written an article, “The Pentagon Strangles Our Economy: Why the U.S. Has Gone Broke,” that I find very persuasive.

Johnson is anything but a Chicken Little saying that “the sky is falling.” In his mind, the sky has already fallen inasmuch as it is almost impossible to overstate the damage that has been done to our economy as a result of our government’s excessive military spending. For years our military expenditures have been more than the rest of the world combined!

The supplemental military budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is not a part of the official defense budget. Yet it alone is larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history and is the largest since World War II.

Few would complain if our security demanded such expenditures, but Johnson argues that “such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defense budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth.” Johnson debunks that myth with a long list of empirical facts.

If you consider yourself a member of the middle class, you might also consider how willingly, even eagerly, you are being manipulated with the present financial handout from Washington in order to pay bills or sustain your present lifestyle. While military spending creates jobs, it creates far fewer than if the funds were used in the civilian sector. 

Johnson illustrates this phenomenon with regard to our country’s insane fascination with the production of nuclear weapons for which there is no valid use. He argues that “the trillions spent on them could have been used to solve the problems of Social Security and health care, quality education ... and retention of highly-skilled jobs within the economy.” The unwise and unbalanced focus on military spending has made our industrial equipment the oldest among the world’s major industrial nations. This does not bode well for America’s economic future.

While some of the damage can never be rectified, Johnson argues that reversing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, cutting back on our global empire of more than 800 military bases and cutting all projects in the defense budget that bear no relationship to national security would certainly help. He accuses the government of using the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs program.

His sober conclusion is that if we do those things, “we have a chance of squeaking by. If we don’t, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression.”

I am very much concerned that he may right.