Romney’s Weird Plan to Decouple Military Spending From National Security Needs and to Tie It Instead to … GDP??
Romney’s plan calls for linking the Pentagon’s base budget to Gross Domestic Product, and allowing the military to spend at least $4 dollars out of every $100 the American economy produces.”
— Defense spending to spike $2.1 trillion under Romney, CNN Money, May 10, 2012.)
In a post here two weeks ago I noted that peculiar proposal of Romney’s, and also mentioned my dismay that neither the Obama campaign nor (to my knowledge) any other mainstream-media outlet had mentioned it. I titled the post Crony Capitalism and Its Variety of Flavors. The occasion for the post was the Romney campaign’s then-newly-invigorated “crony capitalism” schtik featuring, of course, Solyndra.
I said in the post that, given Romney’s open (if unnoticed) proposal to untether actual national-security needs from national-security spendingand attaching it instead to GDP, its purpose is utterly unrelated to national security. It’s unabashedly “a stunningly perverse pinstriped-patronage version of Keynsian economics,” I said.
My post got about as much attention as the May 10 CNNMoney report. But now the Obama campaign has a new ad out highlighting the absurdity of Romney’s plan to increase defense spending—presumably (although the ad doesn’t say this) so that we’ll be prepared when Romney clumsily gets us into an unnecessary war. (Current candidates as enemies: Britain and the Palestinians, in addition to Iran.) The ad is excellent. But it would be even better if it mentioned that Romney’s spending plan doesn’t even purportto be tied to defense needs, but instead to, um, GDP.
It really should point this out and should note the only possible explanation for that. So should Obama himself.
Bev:
If you read Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and The Fall of The Great Powers, you would see a suggestion in it that military spending should not rise any faster than the growth of the economy. This does not imply that 4.5% is the number as our economic growth is near 2% presently. Nor does it say the present expenditures are acceptable as over spending on the military has taken much away from domestic growth. Romney just skews the idea of tying growth to the GDP
Uhhhhh… I can recall a time, back around 1970, when liberals objected to high levels of “defense” spending (the Viet Nam war was going on) and often made the point that the US was spending 6% of its GNP on the military, while most European nations were spending 3.5 to 4% of GNP. The conservative rebuttle to this was that “yes, 6% of GNP is a lot, but just 15 years ago, in the Eisenhower era, we spent 8-9 % of GNP on the military, and people generally felt the economy was in good shape.”
So. I’m not in love with Romney’s idea of spending 4% of GNP on the military, but I sort of understand where the idea came from, and I don’t think it’s a totally insane notion that will immediately destroy the American republic.
Mike:
Wasn’t the Vietnam War funded by a tax, a surtax on income? It was. Now one may argue this also takes away from GDP; but, it does not run up the deficit the way these last two wars did and neither was Vietnam off-budget as was Iraq or Afghanistan. No war preceding these two wars was ever unfunded.
Every country before the US which has skewed its expenditures heavily to the military over dometic expenditures is now eith a 2nd or 3rd tier power. The US is presently in such a decline which will accelerate even moreso as these expenditures on the military continue or increase. We do not need nor should we have such a huge miltary presence which includes the airport security. Domestic growth supports military expenditures which do little for domestic growth.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/25/shared-sacrifice-war-taxes-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html
My point is that Romney’s plan has the tail wagging the dog. Shouldn’t defense spending be set according to what the country’s defense needs are? Defense spending was high during the height of the Cold War because, well, it was the height of the Cold War, not because there was some preset amount tied to GDP. Same with defense spending during the Vietnam War. And, surely, the same was true during earlier wars.
The purpose of defense spending is supposed to be to protect and defend against national security threats, not to fulfill some preset spending formula. Run’s point is that historically it has been harmful to a country to maintain a very high level of defense spending, for a long period of time, relative to GDP. But Romney’s plan doesn’t just set a floor for defense spending, based on a metric unrelated to defense needs; it also has a sliding scale of defense-spending increases based not on defense needs but instead on that unrelated metric. That’s crazy.