The Pros And Cons Of Military Spending

The nature of a fiscal stimulus are up to the discretion of politicians and Keynes was aware of political motivations that would steer spending policies towards war, but he hoped: “that in the future we shall not adhere to this purist financial attitude, and that we shall be ready to spend on the enterprises of peace what the financial maxims of the past would only allow us to spend on the devastations of war.” (Keynes, “World Economic Outlook” 1932). Progress in spending on the “enterprises of peace” since Keynes’ time has been minimal. At this point, military spending has become so ingrained into the annual budget, that questioning military spending is not commonplace in mainstream economic discourse. The U.S. treasury divides all federal …show more content…
The vilification of government spending during this Cold War leaves us with a legacy of one of the great paradoxes of economic theory: politicians who directly expose prudent fiscal discipline as primary tenant of their platform, do not approach military spending with same analysis. The Bush administration was the most recent culprit of this fallacy: “Mr. Bush campaigned in 2000 on a pledge to reduce the size of government”, but left: “ having overseen the biggest federal budget expansion since Franklin Delano Roosevelt seven decades ago” (Ward 2008). The dire fiscal consequences were compound by an administration that: “tried to sell the American people on the idea that we could have a war with little or no economic sacrifice. Even after the United States went to war, Bush and Congress cut taxes, especially on the rich” (Stiglitz 2008). Having a large standing body of forces, excessive active military bases in foreign countries, invading foreign countries, and other excessive expenditures should not be considered under the guise of patriotism or nationalism, but with solely with the economic consequences of the