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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 10/7/21

Congress Fights Over Money for Child Care but never questions Billions For War

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President Biden and the Democratic Congress are facing a crisis as the popular domestic agenda they ran on in the 2020 election is held hostage by two corporate Democratic senators, fossil-fuel consigliere Joe Manchin and payday-lender favorite Kyrsten Sinema. But the very week before the Dems' $350 billion-per-year domestic package hit this wall of corporate moneybags, all but 38 House Democrats voted to hand over more than double that amount to the Pentagon. Manchin has hypocritically described the domestic spending bill as "fiscal insanity," but has voted for a much larger Pentagon budget every year since 2016.

Real fiscal insanity is what Congress does year after year, taking most of its discretionary spending off the table and handing it over to the Pentagon before even considering the country's urgent domestic needs. Maintaining this pattern, Congress just splashed out $12 billion for 85 more F-35 warplanes, six more than Donald Trump bought last year, without debating the relative merits of buying more expensive military planes versus investing $12 billion in education, health care, clean energy or fighting poverty.

The 2022 military spending bill, known as the NDAA or National Defense Authorization Act, which passed the House on Sept. 23 would hand a whopping $740 billion to the Pentagon and $38 billion to other departments (mainly the Department of Energy for nuclear weapons), for a total of $778 billion in military spending, a $37 billion increase over this year's military budget. The Senate will soon debate its version of this bill but don't expect much of a debate there either, as most senators are "yes men" when it comes to feeding the war machine.

Two House amendments to make modest cuts both failed: one by Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., to strip $24 billion that was added to Biden's budget request by the House Armed Services Committee; and another by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., for an across-the-board 10% cut (with exceptions for military pay and health care).

After adjusting for inflation, this enormous budget is comparable to the peak of Trump's arms buildup in 2020, and is only 10% below the post-World War II record set by George W. Bush in 2008 under cover of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would give Joe Biden the dubious distinction of being the fourth post-Cold War U.S. president to militarily outspend every Cold War president, from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush.

In effect, Biden and Congress are locking in the $100 billion per year arms buildup that Trump justified with his absurd claims that Obama's record military spending had somehow undermined military preparedness.

As with Biden's failure to quickly rejoin the JCPOA with Iran, the time to act on cutting the military budget and reinvesting in domestic priorities was in the first weeks and months of his administration. His inaction on these issues, like his deportation of thousands of desperate asylum seekers, suggests that he is happier to continue Trump's ultra-hawkish policies than he will publicly admit.

In 2019, the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland conducted a study in which it briefed ordinary Americans on the federal budget deficit and asked them how they would address it. The average respondent favored cutting the deficit by $376 billion, mainly by raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, but also by cutting an average of $51 billion from the military budget.

Even Republicans favored cutting $14 billion, while Democrats supported a much larger $100 billion cut. That would be more than the 10% cut in the failed Ocasio-Cortez amendment, which garnered support from only 86 Democratic members and was opposed by 126 Democrats and every Republican.

Most of the Democrats who voted for amendments to reduce spending still voted to pass the bloated final bill. Only 38 Democrats were willing to vote against a $778 billion military spending bill that, once Veterans Affairs and other related expenses are included, would continue to consume more than 60% of discretionary spending.

"How are you going to pay for it?" clearly applies only to "money for people," never to "money for war." Rational policy making would require exactly the opposite approach. Money invested in education, health care and green energy is an investment in the future, while money for war offers little or no return on investment except to weapons manufacturers and Pentagon contractors, as was the case with the $2.26 trillion the U.S. wasted on death and destruction in Afghanistan.

A study by the Political Economy Research Center at the University of Massachusetts found that military spending creates fewer jobs than almost any other form of government spending. It found that $1 billion invested in the military yields an average of 11,200 jobs, while the same amount invested in other areas yields 26,700 jobs when invested in education, 17,200 in health care, 16,800 in the green economy or 15,100 jobs in cash stimulus or welfare payments.

It is tragic that the only form of Keynesian stimulus that is uncontested in Washington is the least productive for Americans, as well as the most destructive for the other countries where the weapons are used. These irrational priorities seem to make no political sense for Democratic members of Congress, whose grassroots voters would cut military spending by an average of $100 billion per year, based on the Maryland poll.

So why is Congress so out of touch with the foreign policy desires of their constituents? It is well-documented that members of Congress have more close contact with well-heeled campaign contributors and corporate lobbyists than with the working people who elect them, and that the "unwarranted influence" of Dwight Eisenhower's infamous military-industrial complex has become more entrenched and more insidious than ever, just as he feared.

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Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women for Peace and author of Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the US-Saudi Connection. 

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