{"id":174,"date":"2012-03-22T12:25:07","date_gmt":"2012-03-22T17:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/blog\/?p=174"},"modified":"2013-02-06T16:36:13","modified_gmt":"2013-02-06T22:36:13","slug":"review-of-national-priorities-project-report-by-charlie-edelen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/review-of-national-priorities-project-report-by-charlie-edelen\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of National Priorities Project Report"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Charlie Edelen, PEP Board Member<\/p>\n<p>The National Priorities Project came out with a report a couple months ago, summarizing and analyzing the 2013 Pentagon Budget. I encourage you to <a href=\"http:\/\/nationalpriorities.org\/publications\/2012\/talking-about-military-spending-and-the-pentagon-budget\/\">take a look for yourself at it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Some quick takeaways from the report:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The Defense Department\u2019s annual \u201cbase\u201d budget for Fiscal Year 2013 at $525 billion \u2013 46 percent above the 1998 level \u2013 an important side note: <em>These figures do not include war costs or the nuclear weapons activities of the Department of Energy.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>The military of the future will be smaller, but more agile. (whatever *that* means)<\/li>\n<li>The military will continue to shift its focus towards the Asia Pacific region, in part in response to China\u2019s growing economic and military power, while maintaining a robust presence in the Middle East.<\/li>\n<li>During a Pentagon briefing earlier this year, President Obama said, &#8220;over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow, but the fact of the matter is this \u2013 it will still grow\u2026\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>An extra point worth noting is a section on the military and job creation. One common outcry on cutting significant \u2013 or even semi-significant \u2013 cuts to the military is, \u201cBut you\u2019ll cut all those JOBS\u201d. The summary points to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.peri.umass.edu\/fileadmin\/pdf\/published_study\/PERI_military_spending_2011.pdf\">this report by the Political Economy Research Institute<\/a> that suggests <strong>the military has one of the poorest Returns On Investment on job creation of all the ways to spend money federally<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>The second half of the summary focuses on \u201csequestration\u201d, which is the concept of the \u201cacross the board\u201d budget cuts that will be made to all parts of government <strong>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.<\/strong> While this is a very important topic that all Americans should be paying attention too, it\u2019s complicated, political, and has a lot of noise around it.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAcross the board\u201d is not the worst thing that can happen \u2013 conversely, an agreement may have far less or zero cuts to the budget &#8211; while social service programs, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public employees, funding for general federal infrastructure programs, and others are cut beyond the bone.<\/p>\n<p>Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is, predictably, calling some of the possible cuts \u201cdisastrous\u201d. Some of us would say the cuts would be \u201cbetter late than never.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Some legislators are trying to pass bills that would exempt the military from sequestration. I am simultaneously unsurprised and incredulous at this.<\/p>\n<p>I hope that the needs of America\u2019s current and future citizens have more weight than certain war profiteers\u2019 quarterly profits as our legislators decide where the ax will fall next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019s annual \u201cbase\u201d budget for Fiscal Year 2013 at [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":921,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}