Inside the Pentagon: Defense Dollars

[dpbrown]

http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/defensedollars.html

Inside the Pentagon: Defense Dollars

On July 31, 2003, Reuters led its business news coverage with the headline "Defense Spending Driving U.S. Economy." In January 1961 President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a warning about this symbiotic relationship between government defense spending and the economy in his farewell address to the nation. Indeed, Department of Defense and related defense spending accounts for the majority of federal spending in nearly every state. And the U.S. accounts for 43 percent of world military spending. What are the actual numbers? Click to find out.

Eisenhower's words of warning undoubtedly hold extra weight, coming from an ex-General who had witnessed World War II defense spending restore a depression economy, and a president who presided over crucial years of the Cold War.

The current U.S. defense budget one of the largest in American history. The defense budget has not reached the high percentage of discretionary spending that it held during the Reagan administration. (Discretionary spending is the the portion of the federal budget that Congress can disperse — in 1982 defense spending accounted for 61.1 percent of the total disrectionary budget.) However, the 2003 and 2004 budget numbers do not include the costs of the war in Iraq or peacekeeping and reconstruction efforts. Current Pentagon estimates run to $3.9 billion a month to keep nearly 150,000 American troops in Iraq. White House budget director Joshua B. Bolten puts the total reconstruction costs for 2003 at about $7.3 billion.

http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/defensedollars.html