The summary message here is that our bloated military budget is not the obstacle to non-defense spending growth that some people make it out to be. I have been writing about this for a long time. A few numbers to start us off for Fiscal Year 2022, which ended in September. Receipts are $4.2 trillion. Expenditures are $6 trillion. By advanced math,
Very nuanced and valuable analysis. The big picture is that it has always appeared that military and social expenditures were zero-sum. True, in any one year, there can be conflict over the expenditures. But over the 1945-1990s period that I looked at for a planned dissertation on the Cold War and Social Welfare (I changed topics to wait about 30 years apparent to start re-looking at it with fewer documents classified, hope to get to it in 2024), the growth of both were part of the guns and butter strategy of US national security elites. And the origins were even earlier as Michael Sherry's In the Shadow of War shows: Roosevelt always linked national security and social security. But elite consent to social welfare began to decline after we won the Cold War. Even so, we can still have guns and butter from a budgetary standpoint; obviously we want more butter and far fewer guns.
Very nuanced and valuable analysis. The big picture is that it has always appeared that military and social expenditures were zero-sum. True, in any one year, there can be conflict over the expenditures. But over the 1945-1990s period that I looked at for a planned dissertation on the Cold War and Social Welfare (I changed topics to wait about 30 years apparent to start re-looking at it with fewer documents classified, hope to get to it in 2024), the growth of both were part of the guns and butter strategy of US national security elites. And the origins were even earlier as Michael Sherry's In the Shadow of War shows: Roosevelt always linked national security and social security. But elite consent to social welfare began to decline after we won the Cold War. Even so, we can still have guns and butter from a budgetary standpoint; obviously we want more butter and far fewer guns.