Here’s What a Budget That Prioritizes Peace Looks Like
By Miriam Pemberton
Foreign Policy In Focus, March 16, 2016
http://fpif.org/heres-budget-prioritizes-peace-looks-like/
The Obama administration’s budget proposal for 2017 would jack up military
spending higher than it’s been since World War II. The Republican leadership
in Congress wants to jack it up higher than that.
Fortunately, these aren’t our only choices.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus has mapped out a saner alternative in
what it’s calling the People’s Budget. The CPC’s budget proposal would, for
one thing, end the Pentagon tactic of having a war budget--separate and on
top of "regular" Pentagon spending--that’s become an all-purpose slush fund
for the military’s wish list projects, many of which have nothing to do with
the wars we are fighting.
The challenge in reining in the impulses of public officials to throw ever
more money at the military is that the economies of communities all across
the country have become dependent on it. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are
now tied to the fortunes of Pentagon spending. But luckily the People’s
Budget has embedded in it the means to overcome this Pentagon dependency.
The first and most important way of dislodging an entrenched military
economy is to replace the money that fuels it with other spending--on things
we actually need. Here the People’s Budget is especially strong. Its first
and biggest idea is a $1 trillion investment in our country’s
infrastructure, paid for by military cuts and a fairer tax code. These
investments would begin to take care of the decades of neglect to our
bridges and water systems.
They would also begin to fund the new infrastructure of a future based on
clean energy and transport. The budget allots $150 billion to upgrade the
electrical grid to make it suitable for renewable energy sources. It funds
high-speed rail projects, solar installations, and bus and rail car
manufacturing--all the kinds of big projects well-suited to absorb the
skilled workforce of defense manufacturing.
And the kicker is, studies have shown repeatedly that there are more
well-paying jobs to be had in these lines of work than in manufacturing for
the military.
But there’s still the question of how to get from here to there. Moving the
center of budgetary gravity toward civilian investments gets you a long way,
but not all the way, to a peace economy. Defense-dependent communities need
help thinking through ways to ease the transition from one economic base to
another.
The People’s Budget has answers there too. It increases funding for a
Pentagon agency called the Office of Economic Adjustment, whose reason for
being is to give planning grants and technical assistance to communities
that are trying to plan an orderly transition to a more diversified jobs
base. Also potentially useful in connecting these communities to the
emerging green economy is funding in the People’s Budget for job training
and economic development to ease the transition from fossil fuels.
In the midst of the worst political dysfunction in memory comes this
reminder of what a budget that gives priority to real national needs in
general--and a peace economy in particular--could look like. I’m grateful.
