{"id":271321,"date":"2010-02-02T12:05:48","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T17:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"tag:http:\/\/www.economist.com,2009:21004607"},"modified":"2010-02-02T12:05:48","modified_gmt":"2010-02-02T17:05:48","slug":"time-to-attack-defence-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/271321","title":{"rendered":"Time to attack defence spending"},"content":{"rendered":"

HERE’S your latest budget factoid. The freeze on non-defence discretionary spending, should it come to pass, will trim $250 billion off the cumulative deficit over the next ten years. Over that same period, defence discretionary spending will add $284 billion to the deficit.<\/p>\n

Spencer Ackerman has been providing some nice graphics over the last few days, illustrating the size and relevance of defence spending. Here<\/a>‘s another good one:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Reductions in spending associated with the end of activity in Iraq reduced total defence below the levels it reached during the Bush administration. But the base Defence Department budget continues to grow in a more or less uninterrupted fashion. It’s hard to say how this increase is making Americans safer.<\/p>\n

And it might ultimately be counterproductive to the growth of liberalism. Here<\/a>‘s Real Time Economics’ Bob Davis:<\/p>\n

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[A] January paper<\/a> by economists Daron Acemoglu of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Pierre Yared of Columbia University, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is a reminder that peace is the soil that nourishes trade. The two economists compared the growth of trade between 1988 and 2007 and the growth of militarism over roughly the same time frame and found that countries that experience an above-average increase in military spending are likely to experience a below-average increase in trade.<\/p>\n

\u201cMilitarism is negatively associated with trade,\u201d the two authors argue.<\/p>\n

The economists use an increase in military spending or an increase in the size of the military as proxies for \u201cmilitarism.\u201d Even when they remove from the sample countries actively at war, the findings are the same: more militarism equals less trade growth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s the difference between global politics as a zero sum game and as a positive sum game. Americans need to be asking hard questions about the growth of the defence sector. So far, they’re refusing to do so, even in the face of a looming budget crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HERE’S your latest budget factoid. The freeze on non-defence discretionary spending, should it come to pass, will trim $250 billion off the cumulative deficit over the next ten years. Over that same period, defence discretionary spending will add $284 billion to the deficit. Spencer Ackerman has been providing some nice graphics over the last few […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}