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www.adamhodges.com

Is the United States now a 'warfare' society?

Over $1 billion a day of US taxpayer money goes to a military that outspends most of the world combined. In a recent talk (5 Oct 2004, Univ of Colorado) about his book, The Fourth Power: A Grand Strategy for the United States in the Twenty-First Century,former Senator Gary Hart brought up a heuristic used by the British to calculate their military budget at the height of empire: match the expenditures of the two largest rivals combined.

Interestingly, if the United States did this today, the roughly $35 billion spent by the UK and the $30 billion spent by Russia (the next largest military spenders in 2000/2001) would require a $65 billion budget to match. Let's just say, to ensure complete dominance, that number could be doubled (to $130 billion) and then rounded up ($20 billion) to make a nice even figure. In that case, an annual military budget of $150 billion would be 'required.'

As it is, the 2005 US budget will dedicate over $400 billion for military expenditures. This should beg several important questions, not the least of which concerns the issue of starved social programs at the expense of dominance that goes far beyond hegemony. How much military dominance is enough? When is hegemony no longer simply hegemony? How long can a society sacrifice domestically for the sake of unbridled world empire?

In 1943, Polish economist Michal Kalecki theorized about military-fueled growth, known as military Keynesianism by economists today. Instead of public spending on civilian programs, military Keynesianism does just as its name implies: shifts public spending to military programs. Such a shift necessarily occurs at the expense of vital social programs, and results in large government deficits, such as the $521 billion deficit run up by the current administration for 2004.

In 2003, President Bush oversaw a $48 billion increase in military spending over the previous year. As he proudly stated, it was "the largest increase in a generation." More interesting is the fact that the $48 billion increase was larger than the total military budget of the country second to the US in military spending: the UK's roughly $35 billion annual budget. (Also note, the increase in and of itself would have far outnumbered the less than $2 billion spent by the "imminent threat" of Iraq.)

The White House budget for 2005 "provides $401.7 billion for the Department's [of Defense] base budget, an annual increase of seven percent, for a total increase in defense spending of 35 percent since 2001."

And while military expenditures go up by 7% over 2004 -- and 35% since 2001! -- the budget "holds the rest of discretionary spending (i.e. domestic social programs) to 0.5% growth." (Note also, the $120 billion in supplemental funding for the Iraq war is not included in the regular budget.)

Military Keynesianism does not come without a price. The military power of the United States, as Robert Kaplan states in his book Warrior Politics, is a power unrivaled since the days of the Roman Empire. Will its downfall be an internal implosion due to neglect of its society's welfare in favor of hegemonic warfare?

"Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."