March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

The conclusion of a recent congressional study — that the money saved from each job sliced from the Pentagon’s budget could reappear as two jobs in the civilian sector — can be demonstrated with a wide array of charts and graphs showing how money spent in one sector is more valuable than in another. But removed from two-dimensional theory and placed in the three-dimensional world inhabited by politicians and lobbyists, great theories such as this one tend to not work very well at all.

This is not an indictment of the researchers’ methods, but a call for a clear policy on the inevitable reductions on the U.S. military.

The study, requested by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., assumed that $3 billion in defense money would be transferred from the military to education and infrastructure programs. What it could not assume was what the politicians and lobbyists of Washington would do to $3 billion suddenly being freed up. Would they direct those funds to the most economically productive programs or would they try to shave off a little something for their constituents? The 435 members of Congress, with thousands of lobbyists as cheerleaders, can go through $3 billion faster than the average person can hit a credit-card limit.

President Bill Clinton promised during his campaign that he would cut the Pentagon’s budget more deeply than what former President George Bush did. It is a promise he should keep — the Pentagon’s budget remains at $274 billion, which in today’s dollars is where it was in 1960, at the Cold War’s height. But he also must present and gain public support for clear goals for the money. If, for instance, he wants to use it to reduce the deficit, the study’s conclusion about job creation no longer applies. The same is true if the money were used as a tax break, which President Clinton promised for the middle class.

If a military of the current size isn’t needed, and almost everyone agrees that it is larger than necessary, then it should be trimmed to meet the decade’s challenges, regardless of the end savings or job creation. But simply cutting the military budget isn’t enough: President Clinton and Congress must outline how the money would be spent and how it would profit the country.

These specifics, and protections from pork-barrel additions, should be part of any major budget cut to the Pentagon.


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