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4. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing the US and other “coalition” countries trillions of dollars and will only deepen the economic crisis at home and abroad.
If the priorities of our government are to dominate the globe at the expense of the poor and oppressed abroad, then you can imagine they might not have a large place in their domestic budget for the poor and oppressed in the US.
From my perspective, the issue of the economic cost of war is one of priorities. What our government chooses to spend its massive budget on and what it chooses to cut are reflective of the priorities of the American system: the drive for profit at all costs.
The “cost” of the war in Afghanistan is probably the most broadly accepted criticism. Many on the right oppose the war in Afghanistan purely on these reasons and some in the mainstream political establishment as well. In congress, the only acceptable criticism (a self-imposed limitation mind you) of the war is its economic cost to their constituents.
While I welcome their dissent, I don’t think it is firmly grounded on the desire for genuine self-determination for the people of Afghanistan. To see the ill effects of this war only in terms of how it affects Americans is narrow-minded and smacks of the kind of “white man’s burden” racism I will talk about in the next article.
However, from my perspective, the costs of the war are worth discussing, not because it takes away from our government’s ability to wage the war on drugs or their ability to give more tax breaks to Wal-Mart, but because it takes money from the tax payer that could be used to deliver universal healthcare, better schools, foreclosure relief, jobs programs, and free, quality education to those that want it.
Furthermore, the scale of expenditure is so massive and its ineffectiveness in providing any domestic economic stimulus is so great, that it threatens to prolong and deepen the current economic crisis.
Lets start with a look at the overall, direct cost of the war.
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Those numbers are huge, and hard to comprehend so lets break down the data a little more to make it more understandable. The table below shows that in fiscal year 2006, it cost $390,000 per soldier, on average. Unfortunately, it doesn’t discriminate between the Iraqi and Afghanistan wars, but there is no reason to think that one costs significantly less, per soldier, than the other.
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(click to enlarge) source: http://www.census.gov/prod/2007pubs/p60-233.pdf
As these tables show, its getting more and more expensive to deploy troops given the extra amour, advanced equipment and fuel costs and not only does it tower over the median wage in the US, its rising much faster too. The projected cost of sending one soldier to Afghanistan for one year in 2010 is $1 million.
The chart below compares these numbers to some of the most pressing social needs within the US: Healthcare, Education, and Poverty.
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Military Spending as Economic Stimulus
As a resident of Upstate New York, I have recently heard the argument made that all this military spending is helping the economy. In Syracuse, Hancock Airfield, an Air force Installation, was scheduled to close. Their local congressperson lobbied and secured a contract to keep the base open and add a facility to train and begin operations flying unmanned aerial drones in Afghanistan. The contract saved the roughly 600 civilian jobs needed to operate the base plus around 200 more to operate the unmanned drone facility.
In a city devastated by unemployment and poverty, 800 jobs are nothing to laugh at. This argument is made in city after city around the country and to justify the immense, 1 trillion dollar annual budget for “defense.”
However, I think the question is not whether it is good compared to doing nothing; the question is whether it is effective compared to the alternatives.
First I’ll address the immediate example of whether the base remaining in Syracuse will save jobs and stimulate the economy. Anthropologist Catherine Lutz cites numerous studies in her book, “Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century” showing that the overall economic effect of a military base on the surrounding town or city (in her case Fayetteville, NC) is negative.
She writes, “civilians [became] dependent upon the base for work, with little other economic advantage to the community. (Loss of sales tax, for instance, for goods bought at the tax-exempt PX amounted to $12 million in 2001). “ The changing needs of the military (decisions made in Washington) also make put the long term stability of these facilities into question. (source)
The Big Picture
A few years ago, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned Global Insight, one of the leading economic modeling firms, to project the impact of a sustained increase in defense spending equal to 1.0 percentage point of GDP (equal to the cost of the Iraq war up to that point).
“Global Insight’s model projected that after 20 years the economy would be about 0.6 percentage points smaller as a result of the additional defense spending. Slower growth would imply a loss of almost 700,000 jobs compared to a situation in which defense spending had not been increased. Construction and manufacturing were especially big job losers in the projections, losing 210,000 and 90,000 jobs, respectively.”
Since the projections were made, military spending has grown MORE than the projected 1% and the job loss could therefore be even greater.
The explanation for this is, again quoting PhD economist Dean Baker,
“…defense spending means that the government is pulling away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs.” (source)
Even a common sense look at what you’re investing in will point to the inherent inefficiency of military spending as economic stimulus. Dollars invested in weapons and military personnel are almost 100% destroyed. Bombs are built to explode and destroy lives, buildings and homes and if they don’t they are a complete waste. Author Tod Ensign points out in “America’s Military Today: The Challenge of Militarism” that helicopter repair, humvee repair, weapons system management and other military related occupations have virtually no transferrable skill sets to the civilian world.
More importantly, should we as a society accept the twisted logic that investment in the death of other human beings is an acceptable economic stimulus?
Investment in civilian infrastructure like high-speed rail, schools and clean energy, provide permanent, domestic jobs, that train employees with much more transferrable skill sets, and create what NY Times economist Paul Krugman calls a “multiplier effect.” For example, a high-speed rail system would not only create jobs for the direct manufacture and operation of the rail, who would save money or travel more due to the new system would further spend that money in other areas, shops and restaurants around terminals and tourism generated due to new, cheaper access would “multiply” the effect around the economy.
Another paper published in 2007 by “The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst” entitled “The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities” supports this:
“…defense spending creates 8,555 total jobs with $1 billion in spending. This is the fewest number of jobs of any of the alternative uses that we present. Thus, personal consumption generates 10,779 jobs, 26.2 percent more than defense, health care generates 12,883 jobs, education generates 17,687, mass transit is at 19,795, and construction for weatherization/infrastructure is 12,804. From this list we see that with two of the categories, education and mass transit, the total number of jobs created with $1 billion in spending is more than twice as many as with defense.” (source)
There is also no reason to expect that a massive investment in civilian industries would not produce the same “innovation storm” claimed by pro-military economists as a productive outcome of defense spending. In fact, there is reason to believe that technologies developed for the purpose of warfare are likely to take LONGER to develop into civilian applications as compared to developing them for civilian application in the first place!
The Current Economic Crisis
Regardless of how many jobs are lost, regardless of the economic damage caused by the very people that received the “stimulus”, they will continue along as planned.
Despite the constant whining by Washington and State politicians about budget shortfalls and how “we don’t have the money” for social needs like schools, healthcare and job creation, its obvious that we DO have the money, its just being spent elsewhere.
The recent trillion or so dollars given directly to the banks and the other trillion given to the military in 2009 show the priorities of government spending are clear. And this brings me to my last point.
It is a bit crass to speak only of the domestic economic cost of the war, given the scale of destruction and loss of life in Afghanistan in Iraq. However, many people continue to believe the claim that our government cares about the safety of ordinary Americans enough to fight the terrorists who might attack us on our way to work or at a sporting event.
I hope I have shown in this article that our government doesn’t give a lick about the economic welfare of the American people, let alone the ridiculous claim that it cares about ordinary Afghani’s and Iraqi’s. Our government continues to pour money into wars and into the pockets of the rich, at the expense of our healthcare, our education, and our standard of living.
Are we really to believe that our leaders give a crap whether we live or die from terrorism?
Something else is at work. Other priorities and reasons are at hand. This will be the topic of my last two articles.
Tags: Afghanistan, anti-war, Barack Obama, escalation, Gaza, movement, obama, occupation, oppose, troop escalation, war, War on Terror
1:46 pm. Politics.
