In this New York Times Op-Ed piece, Nicholas Kristof argues that in order to cut government spending the U.S. must eventually make cuts to the obscenely bloated military budget:
We face wrenching budget cutting in the years ahead, but there’s one huge area of government spending that Democrats and Republicans alike have so far treated as sacrosanct.
It’s the military/security world, and it’s time to bust that taboo. A few facts:
• The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.
• The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?
• The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.
• The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.
The absurdity of the military budget is brought home with this piece of trivia:
The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service — and that’s preposterous.
Kristof makes excellent arguments about the ineffective and often counterproductive impact of overwhelming military force in today’s international environment. He highlights how U.S. military bases can become a great source of instability:
After the first gulf war, the United States retained bases in Saudi Arabia on the assumption that they would enhance American security. Instead, they appear to have provoked fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden into attacking the U.S. In other words, hugely expensive bases undermined American security (and we later closed them anyway). Wouldn’t our money have been better spent helping American kids get a college education?
Need to cut the budget? With 58% of the federal budget going to the military, let’s start where there’s the most fat and where the greatest difference can be made: the Department of Defense.
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