Militarization

    For Fiscal Year (FY) 2003, President Bush is calling for $379 billion in military expenditures -- $48 billion more than in FY 2002. President Bush and Congress have exploited the American population's legitimate concern of terrorism by proposing the largest increase of the military budget since the Cold War. The U.S. military budget far exceeds any of its rivals, and aspects of the budget serve questionable interests, such as the two-prong policy in Colombia propelling the war on drugs.

 US Military Budget in Comparative Perspective

  "The U.S. increase of $48 billion [alone] is larger than that of the annual military budget of any other country in the world," said John Isaacs, president of Council for a Livable World, an arms-control advocacy group.

Is this true? Well, the data for other nations is not as up-to-date as the data available for the U.S. and it is likely that other nations have followed suit and increased their military budgets. Nonetheless, comparative figures from other countries are still telling:

Source: The International Institute for Strategic Studies

As one can see from the figures, no country comes even close to the U.S. In fact, the 'rival' for second-place is America's closest ally, the UK, whose military budget is less than one-tenth the amount the U.S. will spend in FY 2003. The US 'enemies' Iran, Iraq and North Korea combined spent slightly over $10 billion in the year 2000, a paltry 3 percent of US military expenditures before the current 'war on terrorism' began. If China is included, the figure is still less than 8 percent.

The Real Cost to American Taxpayers

According to official government statistics, about 17 cents out of every tax dollar goes to military expenditures - a substantial figure in itself. However, this figure is deceiving because it includes Trust Funds such as Social Security (Social Security and Medicare alone "account for" 54 percent of the federal budget), and the expense of past military spending is not distinguished from nonmilitary spending. The practice of combining trust and federal funds (known as the "Unified Budget") began in the 1960s during the Vietnam War. In other words, the government makes the social portion of the federal government look bigger and military portion of the federal budget look smaller.

The War Resisters League has recalculated the federal budget to remove trust funds that are raised and spent separately from income taxes. According to their figures, 32 percent of federal funds go to human resources, while 26 percent of federal funds go to current military spending and 20 percent goes to past military spending (which includes veterans' benefits and 80 percent of the interest on the national debt). In other words, nearly half of federal funds go to military expenditures.

The Bush military budget includes:

 Bush's military budget includes expenditures for over five and a half billion dollars of questionable heavy artillery weapons. Another $38 billion in spending for "Homeland Defense" is spread throughout the budget. While some of this spending goes to such antiterrorism measures as airport security, disaster response and an improved medical crisis network, other spending measures contribute to the erosion of civil liberties and an increasingly militarized society by proposing increased spending for such secretive agencies as the CIA and FBI, increased monitoring of communications, and the arrest of 'suspicious' people.

Meanwhile, social programs are being slashed, including:

-            $700 million in job training and employment programs

-            $85 million to train doctors in children’s hospitals

-            $596 million from the Department of Education after inflation

-            $9 million from worker safety programs

-            $268 million from Community Block Grants (who face $40 billion in deficits)

-            $417 million to repair public housing

The bloated US military budget does little to defend the United States and diverts money needed for essential human purposes, to say little of controversial actions committed by U.S. military operations abroad. The military budget should be slashed to an appropriate level that the (Orwellian) name "Department of Defense" implies.

For this article, I drew heavily from the War Resisters League analysis of the Bush military budget.  See www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm.   Also informative was the Council for a Livable World’s website, www.clw.org

For more information on the staggering corruption in the Pentagon, see Take the Rich Off Welfare, by Mark Zepezauer and Arthur Naiman.