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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 3/22/23

How to Reduce Military Spending

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It ought to be easy. Open bank vault, remove weapons dealers, close bank vault. In reality, we need a ton of tools, work, and luck.

In constant dollar terms, after Korea, Vietnam, Reagan's second term, and Obama's first term U.S. military spending went down, just never as much as it had gone up. So, ending wars, including Cold Wars, may help.

We now have a war underway in which the U.S. participation is understood as primarily spending money. Ending that spending could be expanded into reducing military spending more broadly.

With Afghanistan and Iraq it took a year-and-a-half each to get good U.S. majorities in polls saying the wars never should have been started. The war in Ukraine appears to be on the same trajectory. Of course, those who believed the wars shouldn't have been started did not, for the most part, believe they should be ended. The wars had to be continued for the sake of the troops, even if the actual troops were telling pollsters they wanted the wars ended. My hope is that U.S. opposition to the war in Ukraine may grow in the absence of troopist propaganda, as U.S. troops are not involved in large numbers and not supposed to be involved at all.

We also have the U.S. media looking back, with some glimmers of honesty here and there, at 20 or so years of disastrous war spending. Some of those wars have already been ended without the appropriate reductions in military spending. We can point out that U.S. military spending is now about double what it was in 2000.

We can also point out that the Democratic Party Platform of 2020 promised what we're demanding, and that once elected Biden and the Democrats did the opposite of what they'd promised. That platform tied reducing military spending to ending the wars on Afghanistan and Yemen. They've actually ended one of those and pretended to end the other, while increasing military spending. Actually ending the war in Yemen via the War Powers Resolution might help us cut military spending -- not that ending that war is any easier. But there is an active movement working on it, and a zoom call this Saturday about it with several Congress Members expected to take part.

People have generally caught on that when a bank or a corporation or a disease epidemic that impacts rich people needs money, somebody simply invents unlimited money out of nowhere. So our constant demand that military spending go down so that human and environmental spending can go up may be less persuasive. We may be giving ourselves two incredibly difficult tasks rather than making one of them easier. If the U.S. government were willing to fund education or housing or the environment, it would simply do so. Reducing military spending wouldn't compel it to do so. I conclude that we should not shy away from all the usual comparisons of what we could get for what is spent on militarism, nor from comparing the U.S. military with those of other countries, but that there may be something else that's more important.

I mean the evil of war. The moral case against war, and against the spending that generates more wars. Looking back at our efforts to end the war on Iraq, we never did even really try to teach the public that modern wars are one-sided slaughters. The fact that well over 90% of the deaths were Iraqis never got through, nor the fact that they were disproportionately the very old and young, nor even the fact that wars are fought in people's towns and not on 19th century battlefields. Today the very best Congress Members will tell you the war was a mistake and cost money and so forth. But just image on a smaller scale murdering a bunch of your neighbors and then saying it was a mistake and you're sorry the bullets cost so much, even while buying twice as many bullets every day. The point of teaching people the immorality of war is not to feel good or to make someone feel bad, but to mobilize action. People care. People will act and fund efforts to help distant strangers if someone tells them about the need.

Here's how military spending has gone the past few times through. Biden proposes a massive increase in military spending -- above and beyond both what he proposed the year before and what the Congress increased that to.

The corporate media reports on the budget proposal mostly as if the single item that takes up more than half of it doesn't even exist. Nobody is asked for a preferable budget proposal, just as no presidential or congressional candidates ever are. The basic facts discoverable from a simple pie-chart are kept secret from most people.

Zero Democrats object or encourage No votes or vote-withholding threats or even state that they will personally vote No. (But the Congressional "Progressive" Caucus publishes a so-called "explainer" with three sentences at the end vaguely objecting.)

Congress, with Republicans in the lead, proposes a massive increase over and above Biden's massive increase.

"Progressive" Democrats whimper about the Republican increase, suggesting through omission that it was the only increase.

But, zero Democrats object or encourage No votes or vote-withholding threats or even state that they will personally vote No (the one exception I know of was in the Senate one year, and not exactly a Democrat: Bernie Sanders once said he would vote No).

The bill passes both houses and is signed into law.

"Progressive" Democrats tell people they voted No, and moreover they've cosponsored the People Over the Pentagon Act.

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David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)
 
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