after taking office—a time when the economy was booming and unemployment was at 2.7 percent. Yet today, while America’s economy79 sputters down the road to recovery and the middle class struggles to make ends meet—with more than twenty-six million people unemployed or underemployed and record numbers of homes being lost to foreclosure—the “guns versus butter” argument isn’t even part of the national debate. Of course, today, the argument might be more accurately framed as “ICBM nukes, predator drones, and missile-defense shields versus jobs, affordable college, decent schools, foreclosure prevention, and fixing the gaping holes in our social safety net.”
We hear endless talk80 in Washington about belt tightening and deficit reduction, but hardly a word about whether the $161 billion being spent in 2010 alone to fight wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq might be better spent helping embattled Americans here at home.
Indeed, during his State of the Union speech81 in January 2010, President Obama proposed freezing all discretionary government spending for three years—but exempted military spending, even though the defense bud get has ballooned over the last ten years. According to defense analyst Lawrence Korb82, who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, the baseline defense bud get has increased by 50 percent since 2000. Over that same period, nondefense discretionary spending increased less than half that much.
In fact, as Katherine McIntire Peters reported83 on GovernmentExecutive.com, President Obama is “on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II.” In that time we’ve had Korea, Vietnam, the massive military buildup under Reagan, and Bush’s funded-by-tax-cuts invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the most trying economic times since the Great Depression, Obama’s outgunning them all.
This is not about ignoring the threats to our national security. And it’s certainly not about pacifism. To quote then Illinois84 state senator Barack Obama in 2002, “I don’t oppose all wars. . . . What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” Iraq was never about making us safer. And the original rationale for going to war in Afghanistan—taking on al-Qaeda—has been accomplished, with fewer than one hundred members85 of the group still operating in the country. The irrationality of continuing to spend precious resources on wars we shouldn’t be fighting is all the more galling when juxtaposed with our urgent and growing needs at home.
According to the Los Angeles Times,86 before the summer 2010 surge in Kandahar (cost: $33 billion)—a surge the military claimed was as important to Afghanistan as securing Baghdad was to Iraq—Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Michael Mullen told an Afghan leader that the goals of the surge, as well as defeating the Taliban, included, in the words of the Times, “reducing corruption, making local government work and, eventually, providing jobs.” Talk about “mission creep”!
Is that why we are still fighting a war there nine years later, spending American blood and treasure—to provide jobs for the people of Kandahar? It’s like a very bad joke: “The good news is, the Obama administration is ramping up a multibillion-dollar program that will create a host of new jobs. The bad news is, you have to move to Kandahar to apply.”
The Bush-era rationale for these overseas misadventures was always “We’ll fight ’em over there, so we don’t have to fight ’em over here.” Today, it seems, we’re fighting to create jobs for ’em over there, while we don’t have enough jobs for our people over here. At a time when so many middle-class families are reeling from the economic crisis—and our country is facing the harsh one-two punch of more people in need at the exact moment social services are being slashed to the bone—that seems like the most perverted of priorities.
Berkeley professor Ananya Roy87 defines the troubled state of America not so much as a fiscal crisis as “a crisis of priorities.” And Representative Barney Frank88, who has been one of the few in Washington arguing for the need to cut military spending, says that our military overcommitments have “devastated our ability to improve our quality of life through government programs.” Looking at the money we’ve spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, Frank says, “We would have had $1 trillion now to help fix the economy and do the things for our people that they deserve.”
The National Priorities Project (NPP) provides a useful online tool that brings this bud get trade-off to life by showing—specifically—all the things that could have been done with the money spent on Afghanistan and Iraq. For example, according to the NPP89, since 2003, more than $747 billion of taxpayer money has been spent in Iraq. That could have provided:
• 115 million people with low-income health care for a year;
• or 98 million places in a Head Start program;
• or funding for more than 11 million elementary school teachers;
• or 11 million police officers;
• or 13 million firefighters;
• or 94.7 million college scholarships.
While unaffordable college tuition prevents many qualified young people from achieving the American Dream, we are continuing to spend billions on outdated and redundant military defense programs, including pricey relics of the Cold War, such as the F-22 fighter, the Osprey transport helicopter, and America’s hugely expensive nuclear triad—bombers, submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles—designed to annihilate a Soviet empire that no longer exists.
If we don’t come to our senses and get our deeply misguided priorities back in order, America could find itself a superpower turned Third World nation—dead from our own hand.
BRENDA CARTER
I was a manager of information systems at the same company for thirteen years. I thought my job was secure. All the purchasing approval and bud get monitoring went through me. I attended weekly board meetings. I was well liked.
One day the chief operating officer gave me a high-priority project. I never suspected I would be laid off the next day. When I arrived and said my “good mornings,” my co-workers in finance and administration looked a little sad and they did not respond to my greeting in the normal fashion. I shrugged it off, went to my office, and put down my briefcase.
My phone rang. It was my boss. He told me to come to his office. He told me I was being laid off due to bud get constraints. He said he was sorry but his hands were tied. He told me that since I was a longtime employee I would not be escorted immediately out of the building, and I could take as much time as I needed to remove my belongings.
Since I was at my office most hours of the day, I’d made it feel like home, with plants, pictures, and other personal items. As the manager of information systems, I was the one called to terminate employee user names and passwords. To allow me to clear my office knowing I had access to that information told me my boss trusted me and didn’t want me to be humiliated in front of my co-workers.
Imagine getting up every day for thirteen years to go to the same job and suddenly that part of
