By Dave Anderson:
Our economy is out of whack and overly militarized as that is the only sector where there is a broad political agreement to spend more money. Everything else is left to fate. A commenter at Ian Welsh's place pointed out the following graph which shows where the money has been flowing in the past couple of years:
The military is the only growth sector in the economy. And it will continue to be a growth sector as long as Democrats are afraid of being called wimps and the conservative hegemonic insistence on making every interest a vital US interest continues. This is the best argument against Zenpundit's belief that we are entering an age of austerity; it may be an age of general austerity, but the military will be excluded for a variety of reasons including the basic political fact that this is the only politically palatable avenue of any stimulus spending that is not even less efficient tax cuts to the rentier class.
Dramatic image of priorities badly our of order. I'm not THAT Keynesian at all.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, it is misleading to call military spending "growth." In my vocabulary the word growth means converting investments into greater value; i.e. a pound of steel becomes a pound of watches, or ten years of post-graduate education yields surgical skills or some other professional return (lawyers and politicians not included). In the case of military spending all I see is a jobs program for some and billions of tax money spent on pork for influential connections, way more than is needed for national security.
How much atomic overkill is enough? Last I heard it was on the order of ten times what is required to annihilate mankind.