Facing deep spending cuts, the Department of Defense, including Secretary Leon Panetta, and military-industrial trade associations have complained that tightening the U.S. security budget will cause greater unemployment. And even while toeing the (dubious) conservative line that government spending cannot create jobs, right wingers like Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) insist that military spending must stay high to keep unemployment from increasing.
But a new study (PDF) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, highlighted by economist Dean Baker shows that, contra the conservative talking point, non-military spending can create more jobs than money going to defense programs. The study’s authors, economists Robert Pollin and Heidi Garret-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute, used statistics from the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources to deduce how many jobs are created by public spending in various arenas. Among them, military spending was the lowest, creating fewer jobs per billion dollars spent than even consumer-oriented tax cuts.
Here’s a chart from the study showing how many jobs each area produced from a billion dollars in spending:
Averaged between the three domestic spending priorities of clean energy, health care, and education, those areas create about twice as many jobs per dollar spent as military expenditures. The lower numbers for clean energy and health care spending still create 50 percent more jobs than the military category, and results from putting money into education will mean vastly more employment opportunities.
The paper also weighs the distribution of jobs created over different income levels. Especially with benefits factored in, non-military spending creates jobs at more varied compensation levels, low-, mid- and high-paying jobs. Because spending on the domestic priorities creates so many more jobs, that money will still create plenty of high-paying jobs. The authors conclude that “spending on clean energy, health care, and education will all create many more jobs overall, at all pay levels, than spending on the military.”
Economist Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, commented on the University of Massachusetts study on his blog:
In other words, if the point of spending is to create jobs, then the military is the last place that we would want to put our dollars. But, many in Washington believe in the military spending fairy who blesses the dollars spent on the military with unmatched job creating power that has no basis in normal economic analysis.
It turns out that pouring money into the military is not the only way to use public spending to create jobs. It’s also not even close to the best way: Spending on domestic progressive priorities like clean energy, health care, and education could actually accomplish this more effectively.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today during our fundraiser. We have 5 days to add 340 new monthly donors. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.