Peace Economy
Peace Economy
Peace and Economic SecurityCurrently U.S. military spending dwarfs all other aspects of the U.S. federal discretionary budget, and is more than the combined totals of spending on education, environmental protection, justice administration, veteran's benefits, housing assistance, transportation, job training, agriculture, energy, and economic development. Almost 60 cents of every dollar spent on discretionary spending goes to pay for the military budget. To put the U.S. military budget in perspective, which will likely be $711 billion in 2009, it is roughly equal to the rest of the world’s military budgets combined.The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not included in the regular military budget, and approaching $1 trillion, and are estimated to cost as much as $3 – $5 trillion when interest on the borrowed money and veterans benefits are taken into account. According to a new report the United States is spending between $97 and $215 billion dollars annually on military action to defend access to oil and natural gas reserves around the globe. The Military Cost of Securing Energy provides a critical analysis of the military cost of defending U.S. energy concerns overseas. Along with our own bloated Pentagon budget, the U.S. helps bloat the military budgets of other countries. The United States leads the world in arms exports; in 2007 U.S. arms sales agreements to other countries totaled more than $32 billion. These hundreds of billions of dollars could be better spent funding human needs at home. According to the Political Economy Research Institute at UMASS Amherst, dollar for dollar, domestic spending produces far more jobs than military spending. According to one study, investing a billion dollars of tax revenue in the military creates 8,500 jobs, while investing the same amount in education or mass transit yields more than twice that number of jobs. While the Obama administration has indicated that it will not seek significant changes to the U.S. military budget this year, there are a number of steps that the President and Congress can take to make progress on cutting military spending: Conduct a rigorous review of the current military budget, and eliminate unnecessary spending as suggested by the Unified Security Budget |
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