In Wake of Wall Street Bailout, Stop Bailing Out the Arms Industry

Of the many concerns that went unaddressed in the first two presidential debates between John McCain and Barack Obama, one of the most important was the question of how each candidate would adjust his policy plans to accommodate the impending $700 billion bailout of Wall Street.

Neither candidate has given a terribly persuasive answer. Obama talked about the possibility of slowing down an initiative here or a program there; and in the October 2nd vice presidential debate, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joseph Biden followed up with one specific example, asserting that an Obama administration might have to look at delaying their campaign pledge to double foreign aid.

As for John "the Maverick" McCain, he gave a pseudo-answer, indicating that he would consider a freeze on everything but defense, veterans' benefits, and entitlement programs. In his second iteration he replaced the term "other vital programs" for entitlements. Neither during the debate nor in the mounds of verbiage that followed did any major news organization point out that since the items singled out for exemption by McCain account for as much as three-quarters of the federal budget, the savings from his proposed freeze would fall squarely on those programs that can least afford it: discretionary domestic programs ranging from education, to infrastructure, to environmental protection, to employment and anti-poverty programs. In an economic downturn, the demand for many of these programs will increase simply because the millions of people thrown out of work will need greater support. The notion of freezing these benefits in the midst of a recession represents cruel and unusual punishment.

So, one might ask, where is there room to cut spending? The Pentagon budget, for starters. With total expenditures at over $700 billion and counting — including the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the United States is spending more for military purposes than at any time since World War II. Even if it takes years to disentangle the U.S. military from Iraq — as seems likely even under the Obama/Biden plan — there are plenty of savings to be had in the Pentagon's baseline budget (the part that doesn't include the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan).

There is a large Cold War "hangover" of systems that serve no clear mission in the current global security environment, from $300 million-per-copy F-22 combat aircraft that were designed in response to a new generation of Soviet fighter planes that were never produced to $1 billion-per-copy Virginia-class attack submarines that were originally intended to shadow Soviet subs that are now mostly rusting away in Russian ports. Add to this the unworkable and provocative anti-missile program, at $10 billion per year; the plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons and weapons factories at $200 billion over the next two decades; and the costs of ill-conceived high-tech weapons of the future, like the Army's Future Combat System, and there are tens of billions in annual savings to be had even before accomplishing the essential task of withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq.

While some of the resulting savings can be used to defray the costs of the Wall Street bailout, a better use of funds would be to invest in non-military tools of security that will help prevent future conflicts and pave the way for even deeper cuts in the Pentagon budget over time. This was suggested in the latest "Unified Security Budget" proposal, generated by a taskforce organized by Foreign Policy in Focus (on which the author served as a member).