Opinion Sur
In just 17 years since it declared independence in 1776, the US was not at war. With almost 40 percent of the world’s military budget, the United States exceeds what the next eleven countries spend on that item combined. On the other hand, from 1975 to 2018, the revenues share of 90 percent of Americans fell from 67 to 50 percent, while that of the top 1 percent increased from 9 to 22 percent.
Since 1991, only in 1997 and 2000 the United States was not in military confrontation. In this period, the US was involved in about 15 wars, not counting other interventions.
In 1965, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson described his project of ‘The Great Society’, which was based “on abundance and freedom for all,” demanding “an end to poverty and racial injustice.” Soon after, Johnson would add, “I think we can continue ‘The Great Society’ as we fight in Vietnam.”
The Great Society was “the most ambitious program of domestic reform since the New Deal,” seeking to deepen civil rights, fight poverty, improve education, establish health coverage, and clean up the environment, among other things. This social project would advance with an escalation of war. Johnson had increased his troops.
The funds allocated to the war in Vietnam far exceeded those that Johnson managed to spend in Congress to finance his social project. The U.S. spent $300,000 dollars for every enemy killed in Vietnam, while allocating only $88 dollars per person to poverty alleviation programs. Between 1965 and 1973, $15.5 billion dollars was spent on the Great Society and $120 billion on the Vietnam War.
The Cost of the Vietnam War
Francis M. Bator, national security adviser during 1965-1967, argues that Johnson believed that if he abandoned the war in Vietnam, his presidency would be destroyed and, therefore, the Great Society as well because social projects would have arrived dead in Congress. Years later, Johnson would admit that it was not possible for him to own “the woman he really loved, the Great Society,” as well as “that bitch war on the other side of the world.”
In the entire Vietnam War from 1961-1975, the United States spent more than $141 billion dollars. Added to other military expenditures related to the conflict, the amount reaches 168,000 million (one trillion in current dollars). A sequel to the war is that pensions for Vietnam veterans and their families still cost $22 billion dollars per year: between 1970-2021 they have cost $270 billion dollars.
For Martin Luther King the Great Society was “struck down on the battlefield of Vietnam.” King condemned American expansionism, declaring that it was based on “racism, materialism, and militarism,” characterized by “socialism for the rich” and “individualism for the poor,” because resources to the military sector were obtained through the reduction of progressive social laws.
King claimed that he saw the Great Society as a “broken and gutted program, as if it were an idle political toy of a war-crazed society, and I knew that the United States would never invest the necessary funds or energies in the rehabilitation of its poor as long as adventures like Vietnam continued.” King would conclude that the United States was facing “two wars at the same time, the war in Vietnam and the war on poverty, and it was losing both.”
Nixon’s neoliberal shock
With the arrival of Richard Nixon to the presidency replacing Johnson in 1968, not only would the United States end up losing the Vietnam War, but the Great Society project would be swept away by the neoliberal project. The social pact that had enabled the ‘golden age of capitalism’, with the State acting to mitigate inequalities, was broken. From then on, the undoubted beneficiaries of these policies have been the owners of capital, one of the main proofs being the reduction in the participation of wages in GDP.
The economic policy that became known as the “Nixon shock,” Jude Folly explains, froze prices and wages for 90 days. But, while prices recovered their upward trajectory, wages did not and suffered with the increase in the cost of living. From there, he says, “the business community incorporated wage suppression” as the new way the economy works.
A 2019 report by the House acknowledges the lack of bargaining power of low-wage workers, and admits their responsibility because over the past 40 years “Congress has failed to raise the national minimum wage enough to maintain living standards.”
The House passed a bill to raise, for the first time since 2007, the minimum wage to $15 dollars an hour by 2024 and index them to growth of the median wage, which would more than double its previous level of $7.25 dollars. Folly notes that from the passage of the minimum wage law in 1938 until 1968, Congress had consistently passed increases in parity with productivity gains. If that had continued to this day, the minimum wage today would be $24 dollars.
In contrast, from 1975 to 2018, the revenues share of 90 percent of Americans fell from 67 to 50 percent, while that of the top 1 percent increased from 9 to 22 percent.
Thus, while GDP per capita grew 118 percent in the period, that of the bottom did so by about 20 percent and that of the richest 1 percent did so by more than 300 percent. In particular, top executive salaries (adjusted by inflation) increased 1322 percent between 1978 and 2020, equivalent to 351 times the salary of an average worker in 2020.
As a result, starting in 1975, unlike the end of World War II, the incomes of the bottom 90 percent of people grew more slowly than the economy as a whole, while the incomes of the top 10 percent grew faster. In 2018, it meant a transfer of 2.5 trillion dollars and between 1975-2018, an accumulated of 47 trillion dollars. Consequently, wealth in the United States at the end of 2021 is at its highest since World War II.
The power of the military-industrial complex
In 1961, when saying goodbye to the presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that, because of the Cold War, the country was developing “an immense military establishment and a great weapons industry” whose influence was felt in all aspects of the life of the country. While acknowledging “the imperative need for this development,” he did not fail “to understand its serious implications.”
In particular, he warned that it was necessary to beware “of an unjustified influence” of this “military-industrial complex” within the government. Eisenhower claimed that “every weapon that is manufactured, every warship launched, every rocket fired means, ultimately, a robbery of those who are hungry and do not eat, those who are cold and have no clothes.”
Having reached 13 percent of GDP in 1952, military spending fell to about 6 percent by the end of the Cold War. With the end of the Soviet Union, there was speculation that Americans would no longer have reason for high military spending. In the ’90s, Bush Sr. and Clinton tried to reduce it, but then Bush Jr. and Obama increased it between 3 and 6 percent of GDP. Since 1991, only in 1997 and 2000 was the United States not in a war. In this period, it was involved in about 15 wars, not counting other interventions. Thus, it maintained the trend that reveals that since it declared its independence in 1776, in only 17 years it was not at war.
One view of the impact of U.S. military spending in this century is the benchmark of the $93.26 million dollars per hour that the war on terrorism costs, according to the National Priorities tally, bringing the total amount accumulated since 2001 to more than $7.6 trillion dollars.
Immense military spending
Military budget for 2022 was $778 billion dollars, and by 2023 $813 billion dollars was requested. With nearly 40 percent of the world’s military budget, the United States exceeds what the next eleven countries spend combined.
The Defense Department with $715 billion dollars in the 2022 budget is the second-largest fiscal spending item after Social Security. Other agencies are also linked to the military effort: the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security, and the FBI. In addition, as Foreign Contingency Operations, with a budget of 69,000 million dollars, the cost of past wars appears. Thus, total military spending in 2021 ended up being almost 934,000 million dollars.
When analyzing the size of military spending, Kori Schake quotes former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you your strategy,” to conclude that the United States must expand its budget by 50 percent to meet the goals expressed by its leaders.
Schake argues that “today’s U.S. military is sized to fight only one war” at a time, below what is intended. Matthew Kroenig of the Atlantic Council said that the United States should prepare to win simultaneous wars against Russia and China, so he believes Congress could even “double defense spending.”
Sharon Zhang is shocked by the budgeted military amount because the Senate did not approve $350 billion dollars a year for crucial social spending to save many low- and middle-income Americans from financial ruin because they considered it excessive.
Biden has already sent $2,400 million dollars in military aid to Ukraine since February. Meanwhile, life expectancy in the United States fell from 78.86 years in 2019 to 76.60 years in 2021. In that context, Yifat Susskind, executive director of the organization MADRE, said paraphrasing Eisenhower “they are stealing resources” from our communities “to feed the endless hunger of the military-industrial complex.”
Published in CASH on April 30, 2022
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