Horse & Carriage, Love & Marriage... Buck McKeon & Political Bribes

As you can see from the chart above, "we're #1, we're #1!" Not in math and science scores, not in health outcomes, not in general happiness (we're tied with France at #13)... but in military spending. The only big military spender that wastes a bigger percentage of their gross domestic product on military spending is the brutal fascist dictatorship of Saudi Arabia (8.7%). Our two biggest perceived rivals, China and Russia spend, respectively 2.0% and 3.9% of their GDPs on the military. The U.S. spends 4.7%. In 2011 the U.S. spent $711 billion. China spent $143 billion and Russia $71.9 billion. Throw in the U.K. ($62.7 billion), France ($62.5), Japan ($59.3 billion), Saudi Arabia ($48.2 billion), India ($46.8 billion) and Germany (46.7 billion) and you still only get a fraction of what the U.S. spends. That's right, all the big military spenders combined-- and remember, most of them are our allies-- is considerably less than what the U.S. spends. The U.S. Navy's budget alone-- $149.9 billion annually-- is more than the entire military budget of China. And all this was for 2011. This year the budget shot bast a trillion dollars. In fact, it's almost a trillion and a half dollars this year! You wouldn't know it from hearing the whining and caterwauling of House Armed Services Committee chairman, Buck McKeon. We'll come back to that in a moment.

The standard mainstream indictment of budget-busting military spending in the U.S. usually misses one very important feature: the role of political bribery. We'll come back to that in a moment as well. First let's take a look at a well put together indictment based on budgetary criteria. It comes from Joshua Holland's book, The Fifteen Biggest Lies About The Economy.

Even the most hawkish of deficit hawks are quite fond of some aspects of big government. Most are military hawks as well. So, even though they warn of economic destitution coming over the horizon unless we tear more holes in an already threadbare social safety net, they rarely mention the enormous amounts of money that are spent on the security state and national “defense.” It’s as if money for guns is somehow different from money spent on butter.

If you want to look at long-term budget busters, however, there’s no better place to look than our military spending. Never mind what we’re paying for today’s wars-- the $685 billion defense budget tells only part of the story. The little-discussed truth is that we’re still paying for Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, Somalia, the Balkans, and on and on.

Estimates of just how much of our national debt payments are due to past military spending vary wildly. Economist Robert Higgs calculated it like this:

I added up all past deficits (minus surpluses) since 1916 (when the debt was nearly zero), prorated according to each year’s ratio of narrowly defined national security spending-- military, veterans, and international affairs-- to total federal spending, expressing everything in dollars of constant purchasing power. This sum is equal to 91.2 percent of the value of the national debt held by the public at the end of 2006.

In 2006, he came up with an annual figure of $206.7 billion for interest payments alone on our past militarism. Add it all up, and we’re talking about at least a trillion dollars in military and homeland security spending. If there were a million-dollar bill, you’d have to stack a million of them to reach a trillion dollars. It’s almost three times the entire budget for the Department of Health and Human Services, which is tasked with protecting the well-being of all Americans.

So the stark reality is that what poses as a debate between advocates of “big government” and fiscal conservatives is actually a debate about priorities, because we’re going to spend a lot of money on government regardless of who occupies the White House and who’s running Congress. The questions come down to what those massive piles of dollars are going to buy, and whether we’ll raise enough taxes to cover it or simply borrow the cash from the Chinese and let future generations worry about paying it back.

As you could probably guess-- and as President Eisenhower solemnly warned-- the Military Industrial Complex has taken over the U.S. economy and political establishment. Since 1990 armaments makers and war contractors have contributed $140,774,270 to congressional campaigns-- $78,109,504 to Republicans and $62,082,021 to Democrats. Where did they get that $140,774,270 with which to bribe politicians? Overwhelmingly from the taxpayers. What a racket these politicians have! It's like taking a cut from the huge amounts of our money they spend on the Military Industrial Complex, most of which is wasted.

In the current election cycle, the arms manufacturers and contractors have already spent $13,064,521. The biggest single recipient is their #1 whore in Congress, the southern California huckster who's out trying to persuade Congress to spend more and more and more-- on drones, on expensive weapons systems the Pentagon doesn't want, on anything and everything on which he can get a kickback for himself and for his family members.

So far this year McKeon has managed to squeeze $430,850 from war industries-- more the second and third biggest recipients combined-- Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL- $167,350) and presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX- $167,000). Is $430,850 a lot? Most Big Businesses give the lion's share of their bribes to Speaker John Boehner and Republican leaders Eric Cantor in the House and Miss McConnell in the Senate. Boehner got $95,650 from the arms makers and war contractors; Cantor got $56,900 and Miss McConnell got $37,900. So the 3 top Republicans in Congress together accepted legalistic bribes from war industries to the tune of $190,450. Combined that's still less that half of what McKeon took in this year alone.