America's Biggest Jobs Program -- The U.S. Military | TPMCafe

America's Biggest Jobs Program -- The U.S. Military | TPMCafe.

America's biggest -- and only major -- jobs program is the U.S. military.

Over 1,400,000 Americans are now on active duty; another 833,000 are in the reserves, many full time. Another 1,600,000 Americans work in companies that supply the military with everything from weapons to utensils. (I'm not even including all the foreign contractors employing non-US citizens.)

If we didn't have this giant military jobs program, the U.S. unemployment rate would be over 11.5 percent today instead of 9.5 percent.

And without our military jobs program personal incomes would be dropping faster. The Commerce Department reported Monday the only major metro areas where both net earnings and personal incomes rose last year were San Antonio, Texas, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. -- because all three have high concentrations of military and federal jobs.

This isn't an argument for more military spending. Just the opposite. Having a giant undercover military jobs program is an insane way to keep Americans employed. It creates jobs we don't need but we keep anyway because there's no honest alternative. We don't have an overt jobs program based on what's really needed.  . . .

The Pentagon's budget -- and its giant undercover jobs program -- keeps expanding. The President has asked Congress to hike total defense spending next year 2.2 percent, to $708 billion. That's 6.1 percent higher than peak defense spending during the Bush administration.

This sum doesn't even include Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, nuclear weapons management, and intelligence. Add these, and next year's national security budget totals about $950 billion.

That's a major chunk of the entire federal budget. But most deficit hawks don't dare cut it. National security is sacrosanct.

Yet what's really sacrosanct is the giant jobs program that's justified by national security. National security is a cover for job security.

This is nuts.

Wouldn't it be better to have a jobs program that created things we really need -- like light-rail trains, better school facilities, public parks, water and sewer systems, and non-carbon energy sources -- than things we don't, like obsolete weapons systems?

Historically some of America's biggest jobs programs that were critical to the nation's future have been justified by national defense, although they've borne almost no relation to it. The National Defense Education Act of the late 1950s trained a generation of math and science teachers. The National Defense Highway Act created millions of construction jobs turning the nation's two-lane highways into four- and six-lane Interstates.

Maybe this is the way to convince Republicans and blue-dog Democrats to spend more federal dollars putting Americans back, and working on things we genuinely need: Call it the National Defense Full Employment Act.

Suppose, just suppose, that we shifted our federal spending to create those things we really need -- nation building, if you will --  like light-rail trains, better school facilities, public parks, water and sewer systems, and non-carbon energy sources  -- but instead of letting the land value that such investment creates be privatized by whoever owns the land they serve, we collected the value WE created, and used it to fund next year's investment in public goods and services?

Sounds like a virtuous circle to me.

And one which we could recommend to the voters in resource-rich countries.

And collecting that value would have a lot of other highly desirable effects, including reversing urban and suburban sprawl, reducing the price of housing, increasing wages, reducing the concentrations of wealth and income, stabilizing our economy.   Pick one of those that you don't think would be good for America.

And it isn't pork if it creates value which is then recycled for public purposes.  It is pork when we permit it to be privatized

Comments

[Troy]

$700B / 4M jobs is $175,000 per job.

There's some leakage there since I'm pretty sure the average salary isn't pushing $200K!

Going with a median of $100,000 per job, $700B *should* fund 7M jobs.

Plus of course the velocity of money effect *should* create at least one local job for each $100K job, for a total of 14M jobs directly or indirectly funded from the DOD purse.