Review of National Priorities Project Report
by Charlie Edelen, PEP Board Member
The National Priorities Project came out with a report a couple months ago, summarizing and analyzing the 2013 Pentagon Budget. I encourage you to take a look for yourself at it here.
Some quick takeaways from the report:
- The Defense Department’s annual “base” budget for Fiscal Year 2013 at $525 billion – 46 percent above the 1998 level – an important side note: These figures do not include war costs or the nuclear weapons activities of the Department of Energy.
- The military of the future will be smaller, but more agile. (whatever *that* means)
- The military will continue to shift its focus towards the Asia Pacific region, in part in response to China’s growing economic and military power, while maintaining a robust presence in the Middle East.
- During a Pentagon briefing earlier this year, President Obama said, “over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow, but the fact of the matter is this – it will still grow…”
An extra point worth noting is a section on the military and job creation. One common outcry on cutting significant – or even semi-significant – cuts to the military is, “But you’ll cut all those JOBS”. The summary points to this report by the Political Economy Research Institute that suggests the military has one of the poorest Returns On Investment on job creation of all the ways to spend money federally.
The second half of the summary focuses on “sequestration”, which is the concept of the “across the board” budget cuts that will be made to all parts of government if the Super Committee cannot come up with an approved plan for cutting $1.2 trillion over the next ten years by December of this year. While this is a very important topic that all Americans should be paying attention too, it’s complicated, political, and has a lot of noise around it.
“Across the board” is not the worst thing that can happen – conversely, an agreement may have far less or zero cuts to the budget – while social service programs, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public employees, funding for general federal infrastructure programs, and others are cut beyond the bone.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is, predictably, calling some of the possible cuts “disastrous”. Some of us would say the cuts would be “better late than never.”
Some legislators are trying to pass bills that would exempt the military from sequestration. I am simultaneously unsurprised and incredulous at this.
I hope that the needs of America’s current and future citizens have more weight than certain war profiteers’ quarterly profits as our legislators decide where the ax will fall next year.
