The public debt has ballooned to over $11 trillion, or $38,000 per person, and shows no signs of coming down. Years of unbalanced budgets, exacerbated by skyrocketing social security and Medicare costs, have placed the United States on a perilous path long before the current financial crisis wreaked havoc on the economy and dried up tax revenues.
Even as Congress treads water on health-care reform over fears of rising costs, and education remains chronically underfunded, the Department of Defense’s budget is set to increase to $663.7 billion.
The priorities of the government are out of step with what this country desperately needs: investment in the welfare of Americans, not destruction elsewhere. While a strong military is certainly critical to America’s prosperity, current spending is simply far too exorbitant and wasteful.
The $663.7 billion doesn’t even account for spending in Iraq and Afghanistan and is more than what China, the U.K., Russia, France, Germany and Japan spent in 2009 combined. The United States’ biggest competitor, China, spends only $70 billion, a paltry percentage of what we pour into defense.
As one of the most influential nations in the world, it should come as no surprise that we spend the most on military, but to outspend the rest of the world so drastically is questionable public policy when our government cannot even find the resources to support its domestic programs.
Strong societies are built at home, not abroad, yet we spend more and more each year on military and foreign interventions.
For much of the 20th century, increasing the military budget year to year was deemed necessary as a means to keep pressure on the USSR and win the Cold War. These increases were based largely on CIA reports that the CIA has since admitted were exaggerated to show that the Soviets were spending much more than they actually were.
As a result of this misinformation and deception, U.S. military expenditures increased disproportionately to actual need. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the knowledge that spending was likely excessive all along, the military budget has increased steadily ever since.
For fear of appearing soft or as not supportive of the troops, politicians, both Democrat and Republican, have consistently shied away from making any significant changes in the military budget. This needs to change.
Consider that $663.7 billion spent on military is over 10 times what we spend on education and accounts for nearly half of all discretionary spending in the United States budget.
A 20 percent cut in military expenditures would save roughly $135 billion annually, an amount that could be used to triple spending on education, greatly offset the costs of health care reform or bolster Social Security payments. Even then, the United States would still spend $500 billion on military, still more than what the whole European Union and China spend combined.
In studies comparing the world’s education systems, the United States consistently ranks near the bottom among wealthy nations. Among adults ages 25 to 34, the U.S. is ninth among industrialized nations in populations that have at least a high school degree, and seventh out of populations who hold a college degree.
By both measures, the U.S. was first as recently as 20 years ago. If this isn’t shocking enough, as of 2002 America ranked 37th in the world in education spending as a percent of gross domestic product, behind Cuba and Mongolia.
That’s a rather pathetic effort for the world’s richest country, and the American public deserves better. Placing bombs before books is a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars, one that threatens the prosperity of this country in the long run.
President Obama was elected by an American public dissatisfied with an administration that prioritized aggressive foreign policy over investment in America and prudent stewardship of the economy. The United States is in financial peril and in the midst of an education gap that threatens long-term competitiveness, and Obama is going to have to make some very tough decisions to restore strength and stability to America.
Cutting defense spending by a significant amount is a no-brainer. If the president and Congress can find the taxpayer dollars (over 700 billion of them), to bail out the companies and financial institutions that got us in this mess, a far less costly bailout of the education system or other domestic programs isn’t too much to ask.
Obama should see our current military spending for what it is, an excessive and wasteful use of taxpayer dollars. The voters handed Obama an overwhelming mandate and the first democratic supermajority since the ’60s.
It’s time we set our priorities straight and give our children the same resources we give our troops.
E-mail Wright at gwright@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.