Time to Choose: Well-Being or War?

Photo: Mike Prokosch Mike Prokosch, Coordinator
New Priorities Network

In this timely piece, Mike Prokosch explains what the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction failed to accomplish and what the status quo means to our non-profit organizations and the nation.

Our economy is about to take a big hit. Deep cuts in federal spending, triggered by August’s Budget Control Act of 2011, will hit our region’s leading industries – healthcare, high tech, defense – in 2013 and continue for 10 years.

Demand for non-profit service provision will rise as jobs disappear and family stress multiplies. Overall, non-profit grantmaking may shift from changing our society to bandaging its casualties.

An Alternative

How to Fix the Deficit

Tax cuts for the rich - plus military spending hikes - equals deficits as far as the eye can see. By one set of figures, tax cuts for families over $250,000 a year contributed $2.8 trillion to the $15 trillion federal debt over the past ten years. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed $1.4 trillion. Increases in the Pentagon’s base budget over the past decade, not including the wars, contributed $5.9 trillion.

There is an alternative. But it means doing what the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, commonly called the Supercommittee, did not. The alternative calls for us to restore enough taxes to pay the nation’s bills, and shift spending from the Pentagon to non-defense spending.

Military spending now eats at least 58 cents of every tax dollar in the federal discretionary budget (which doesn’t include Medicare, Medicaid, some other safety net programs and interest on the debt). The Pentagon’s budget has doubled in the past 10 years. Non-military discretionary programs grew only 39% and will shrink in real terms over the next decade. The scale of military spending is hard to fathom.

But for the $16.8 billion Massachusetts taxpayers will send the Pentagon this fiscal year, we could buy low-income healthcare for 5.1 million children, hire 215,345 elementary school teachers, give 1.4 million university students scholarships, or provide renewable wind-generated electricity to 22.7 million households, assuming there’s enough wind power to go around. Add in the other New England states and our sister states across the nation … Well, you get the point.

But Don’t We Need the Defense Jobs Now More Than Ever?

Graph of scarcity vs. abundance But what about all those defense jobs? Massachusetts is the fifth-largest state recipient of Pentagon dollars. Don’t we need all those good-paying research and manufacturing jobs?

No, and here’s why choosing military spending will actually hurt the state’s economic future.

A month ago, down at Occupy Boston, I ran into a design engineer. His job category is in high demand. He gets 3 or 4 calls a week from headhunters who want him for some high-tech company. He used to work for a small Massachusetts defense company that was developing a new, exotic device for military use. The problem was that it couldn’t work. “It was the most dead-end project I ever worked on,” said my acquaintance. But the company’s owner kept the project going as long as possible and milked every possible dollar out of the Pentagon cash cow. My acquaintance quit, took a huge cut in pay, and is now doing what he values more – designing medical devices for Alzheimer’s patients.

Smarter Choices

That was a moral choice. But for our New England states and nation, it’s a good economic choice, even in conservative free-market terms. If our future is in brains and services – high-tech and healthcare – then military spending is diverting scarce talent and treasure, stifling our growth in our most promising sectors.

We’re up against hard choices. Unless we undo the deficit deal, we are going to lose jobs – a lot of them. Let’s choose which jobs we want to lose. Every billion dollars we spend creating jobs in defense could create half again as many if they were invested in clean energy, almost twice as many in healthcare, and two and a half times as many in education.

The reality is that unless we undo the deficit deal, we’re going to lose jobs. Let’s choose which jobs. Will we sacrifice military jobs that are sapping the state’s economic future? Or will we cut twice as many jobs in education, healthcare and high tech?

As non-profit professionals and allies, we’ve been on the front lines serving those affected most adversely by an increasingly and unsustainably unequal society. We know which route we need to take.

Mike Prokosch is a coordinator of the New Priorities Network, which links “fund our communities – cut Pentagon spending” projects across the country. He lives in Dorchester.