News Release Archive | budget | Accuracy.Org

How Much Does Washington Spend on “Defense”?

May 23, 2012

CHRIS HELLMAN and MATTEA KRAMER, mattea at nationalpriorities.org
Hellman is communications liaison at the National Priorities Project, and Kramer is a research analyst with the group. They just wrote a report “War Pay: The Nearly $1 Trillion Security Budget,” which tallies the military budget, showing it to be much higher than is often stated. Their piece states: “In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion – a staggering enough sum that it’s worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money’s lodged. …

“The Pentagon’s base budget doesn’t include war funding, which in recent years has been well over $100 billion. With U.S. troops withdrawn from Iraq and troop levels falling in Afghanistan, you might think that war funding would be plummeting as well. In fact, it will drop to a mere $88 billion in fiscal 2013. By way of comparison, the federal government will spend around $64 billion on education that same year. …

“You might assume that we’ve already accounted for nukes in the Pentagon’s $530 billion base budget. But you’d be wrong. Funding for nuclear weapons falls under the Department of Energy (DOE), so it’s a number you rarely hear. In fiscal 2013, we’ll be spending $11.5 billion on weapons and related programs at the DOE. And disposal of nuclear waste is expensive, so add another $6.4 billion for weapons cleanup.”

Majority Favors Cutting Military Budget

May 15, 2012

Discretionary Spending Areas (Billions of Dollars)

STEVEN KULL, skull at pipa.org
Kull is director of the Program for Public Consultation, a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and lead author of the recently released study “Consulting the American People on National Defense Spending.”

He said today: “Three quarters of respondents favored cutting defense as a way to reduce the deficit, including two thirds of Republicans as well as nine in ten Democrats. …

“Other polls on defense spending have mostly asked simply whether respondents favor or oppose defense cuts, and generally found smaller numbers favoring cuts. This suggests that Americans generally underestimate the size of the defense budget and that when they receive balanced information about its size they are more likely to cut it to reduce the deficit. …

“The area cut by the greatest percentage was nuclear weapons, which respondents reduced an average of 27 percent (Republicans 18 percent, Democrats 35 percent). The area that was cut the most in dollar terms was for existing ground force capabilities which was cut an average of $36.2 billion (Republicans $23.8 billion, Democrats $44.5 billion) or 23 percent.

“What is striking is that it appears that the American people, unlike Congress, are able to thoughtfully recognize the validity of arguments both for and against cutting defense spending and still come to hard and even bold decisions.

“Eight in ten favored cutting the Obama administration’s proposed budget of $88 billion for 2013 war spending in Afghanistan. Overall, on average it was cut 40 percent or $35 billion.”

Note: Respondents were queried about “defense” spending, not “military” spending, which likely would have drawn even less support.

Sen. Conrad Proposal “Would Dismantle Social Security”

April 18, 2012

NANCY ALTMAN, ERIC KINGSON, via Sarah Shive sshive at socialsecurity-works.org
Altman and Kingson are co-chairs of the Strengthen Social Security Campaign. The group released a statement today, which said that Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent “Conrad’s budget mark, the Fiscal Commission Budget Plan, incorporates the Social Security cuts contained in the Bowles-Simpson proposal. Unfortunately, some seem to have forgotten what the Bowles-Simpson proposal would entail for Social Security. The proposal would cut the benefits of all current beneficiaries, drastically cut the benefits of future generations, and worse, effectively end Social Security as we know it.

“Senator Kent Conrad’s Fiscal Commission Budget Plan incorporates the Social Security proposals of the Bowles-Simpson plan. Members should know that this plan would cut benefits for today’s and tomorrow’s beneficiaries. Of even greater concern, it would dismantle Social Security. Specifically, the Conrad/Bowles-Simpson plan would:

* Drastically cut the benefits of middle-class families: The Bowles-Simpson proposal cuts Social Security’s retirement, survivors, and disability benefits by between 19 percent and 42 percent for young people entering the workforce today.

* Reduce the annual Cost of Living Adjustment for current and future Social Security beneficiaries: The Bowles-Simpson proposal would cut the COLA for current and future Social Security beneficiaries, reducing benefits more with every passing year. This would prevent benefits from keeping up with increases in the cost of living over time. Under these plans, retirees claiming benefits at 65 would see their benefits decline by 3.7 percent at age 75, by 6.5 percent at age 85, and 9.2 percent at age 95.2.

* Raise the full retirement age to 69, and the earliest eligibility age to 64: Because of the way that Social Security benefits are calculated, raising the retirement age, as the Bowles-Simpson proposal recommends, is indistinguishable from an across-the-board benefit cut, no matter how long workers continue to work — even when they work to age 70 and beyond. Raising the full retirement age by two full years amounts to a 13 percent benefit cut, on top of the 13 percent cut already made when the retirement age was increased from 65 to 67.3. The cuts are hardest for workers in physically demanding jobs, poor health, or otherwise unable to continue to work.

* Radically restructure the program: The Bowles-Simpson proposal would destroy Social Security by stealth. It would eliminate a fundamental and carefully-crafted feature that has been part of the program since the beginning. As figure 1 shows, over time, everyone would receive nearly the same subsistence level benefit unrelated to wages.

* Cut benefits for the most vulnerable: More than half of all workers with an annual income of about $11,000 would see their benefits cut by about 16 percent under the Bowles-Simpson proposal.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues Tagged With: budget, Eric Kingson, Kent Conrad, Nancy Altman, social security,

Ryan Budget: Increases Pentagon, “Out of Touch”

March 20, 2012

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) unveiled a 2013 budget plan today.

WILLIAM HARTUNG, hartung at newamerica.net
Hartung is a senior research fellow in the New America Foundation’s American Strategy Program and author of the book Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, which is just being released in paperback. He said today: “While pretending to make the ‘tough choices,’ Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget cutting plan gives a free ride to the largest single item in the discretionary budget: Pentagon spending. In fact, Ryan would spend $400 billion MORE over the next decade than current Pentagon plans. That will result in harsh cuts to virtually every other domestic program. By contrast, the budget developed by the Sustainable Defense Task Force, a plan endorsed by Representatives Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Ron Paul (R-Texas), would reduce military expenditures by $1 trillion over the next ten years. This can be done without undermining our security, by taking measures such as eliminating outmoded and unnecessary conventional weapons, cutting the Army and Marines back to pre-2001 levels, and eliminating plans for new nuclear bombers, submarines and weapons factories.

“Even as Ryan goes easy on the Pentagon, Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney offers the arms industry an unprecedented bonanza. His plan, which would keep Pentagon spending at 4 percent of Gross Domestic Product, would result in $8 trillion more in Pentagon spending over the next decade, roughly 25 percent more than even Ryan’s generous plan. If Romney endorses the Ryan plan, it is fair to ask whether he is going to eliminate his prior commitment to massive Pentagon budgets or simply pretend the differences between the two approaches don’t exist. That would be a huge deception, if he’s allowed to get away with it.”

ROBERT KRAIG, robert.kraig at citizenactionwi.org
Kraig is executive director of Citizen Action of Wisconsin. He said today: “It is shameful that Paul Ryan and the House Republicans are proposing massive cuts that will further threaten economic and health security for 99% of Americans to fund billions of dollars in irresponsible new tax giveaways for the wealthy.”

KAREN DOLAN, via Lacy MacAuley, lacy at ips-dc.org
Dolan, fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and director of IPS’s Cities for Progress project, said today: “Ryan unveiled a 2013 budget plan that would impose unnecessary hardship on already hurting Americans. Before the economy has had a chance to bounce back, the GOP budget would slash critical safety net programs to rates below what both parties had agreed to in last summer’s Budget Control Act. At the same time, the Ryan budget would give tax breaks to the wealthy and to corporations. I think this shows not only that the GOP is wildly out of touch with average Americans, but that they lack the ability to lead us anywhere but off a cliff. We need revenues, investments, jobs and a strong safety net for the millions of Americans who continue to suffer from the 2008 recession. Tax breaks for the rich and less for everyone else is an idea which has already failed the vast majority of Americans.”

Filed Under: Electoral Issues, The U.S. Economy Tagged With: budget, economy, military spending, Robert Kraig, social security, William Hartung,

Obama’s 2013 Budget: Beyond the Partisanship

February 14, 2012

DAPHNE WYSHAM, daphne at ips-dc.org
Wysham is the co-director or the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She said today: “The good news in Obama’s 2013 budget is that he proposes ambitious initiatives on public transit, clean vehicles, energy efficiency, and renewable energy issues, and has proposed to eliminate $4 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. The bad news is that he doesn’t go far enough on all fronts to ensure that the dirty energy industries of the past — including offshore oil and gas drilling, nuclear power and coal — are taken off the dole and made to clean up their messes, thereby allowing truly clean energy to compete on a level playing field.”

KAREN DOLAN, karen at ips-dc.org
Dolan is director of the Cities for Progress Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She said today: “On the domestic side, the President’s budget has some good proposals for investments and some progressive revenue-raisers. It works well as a populist campaign document and is important as such. However, some programs for low-income families would suffer further unnecessary cuts and the President proposes, over 10 years, to reduce non-security discretionary spending from its current 3.1 percent of GDP to a 50-year low of 1.7 percent. We have to do better.”

ROBERT ALVAREZ, bob at ips-dc.org
Alvarez, a senior scholar of nuclear policy at the Institute for Policy Studies, said today: “President Obama’s proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency of $8.3 billion, while reduced from the previous year by $105 million, also reflects some important increases to states and Indian tribes to better enforce the Clean Air and Clear Water Acts. About 60 percent of the Department of Energy’s budget is going mostly for nuclear weapons and the cleanup of nuclear weapons sites. The single largest expenditure in DOE is for nuclear weapons, which commands 27 percent of DOE’s entire budget.”

MIRIAM PEMBERTON, miriam at ips-dc.org
Pemberton, a research fellow with Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, said today: “The preventive medicine in our security budget — including diplomacy, peacekeeping, economic development, climate stabilization — has been shortchanged for years as military spending has surged. Though the President has talked about investing more in prevention, his budget fails to do so. It leaves the extreme imbalance between military and non-military spending virtually unchanged through 2016.”

Tagged With: budget, Daphne Wysham, economy, Karen Dolan, Miriam Pemberton, Robert Alvarez,

Budget “Decimates” Water Protections

April 12, 2011

WENONAH HAUTER, via Darcey Rakestraw
Executive director of Food and Water Watch, Hauter said today: “The latest agreement between Congressional leaders and President Obama decimates water protections. The ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to help municipalities deliver clean water to U.S. citizens has been seriously threatened with cuts to the Clean Water and Drinking Water SRFs [State Revolving Funds], the mechanism by which the federal government dispenses funds for the upkeep of our tap water and sewerage systems.

“The budget agreement for the six month fiscal year 2011 Continuing Resolution announced yesterday includes a $997 million cut to the SRFs as compared to FY2010, and a $797 million cut as compared to the President’s FY2011 request.

“The cuts to the SRFs account for about 2.6 percent of all cuts agreed to in the CR, but in FY2010 they accounted for only about 0.1 percent of the budget. If Congressional leaders were looking for budget savings, they should have looked elsewhere. If they were aiming to gut the EPA, they moved a step closer to accomplishing their goal today.

“The cuts to food safety, while not as dire, will make it hard for the Food and Drug Administration to implement recently-passed food safety legislation, with $11 million cut from the FY2011 budget request for the FDA. And $10 million has been cut from the U.S. Department of Agriculture meat and poultry inspection budget, hopefully falling short of the need to furlough inspectors, but putting programs like catfish inspection in jeopardy.”

Background: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: “CBO Report: Ryan Plan Specifies Spending Path That Would Nearly End Most of Government Other Than Social Security, Health Care, and Defense by 2050”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Filed Under: The U.S. Economy Tagged With: budget, water,

“Deficit Fears Irrational, Cuts Will Impede Recovery”

March 1, 2011

JAMES K. GALBRAITH, THEA HARVEY
Chair of Economists for Peace and Security, Galbraith (available for a limited number of interviews) is Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. chair in government/business relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest book is The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. Harvey is executive director of Economists for Peace and Security.

MICHAEL INTRILIGATOR
Intriligator is a professor of economics, political science and public policy at UCLA. He is also a senior fellow of the Milken Institute in Santa Monica and at the Gorbachev Foundation of North America in Boston. (He is unavailable Wednesday morning.) He is one of the signatories to a statement distributed by Economists for Peace and Security, which states in part:”The budget cuts being proposed will impede and may end the recovery. If the recovery fails, unemployment will increase and the financial crisis could re-emerge. The premise that the U.S. government is broke is false. The U.S. government has never defaulted and will not default on any of its financial obligations. Deficit spending is normal for a great industrial nation with a managed currency, and it has been our normal economic condition throughout the past century. History proves, and sensible economic theory confirms, that in recessions, increased federal spending — not balancing the budget — is the tried and true way to return to a path of sustained growth and high employment.

“Eliminating waste in government spending is desirable. But that is not what the House proposes; indeed the House budget failed to address the largest waste in federal government, namely in the military, and the House failed to remove our most egregious subsidies, such as to oil companies. To adopt a policy of deep budget cuts at this stage of recovery is to surrender to irrational fears in the service of a political, not an economic, agenda.” PDF of full statement with list of signatories

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Filed Under: The U.S. Economy Tagged With: budget, deficit, Korea,

Budget

February 14, 2011

THOMAS FERGUSON
Ferguson is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and a senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute. He just wrote the piece “Obama’s Budget Speaks to Wall Street, Ignores Voters” for New Deal 2.0.

KEVIN GRAY
Gray is author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics and a regular contributor to The Progressive magazine and CounterPunch. He said today: “The proposed $4 trillion budget targets cutting ‘non-defense discretionary spending,’ or programs that benefit low-income Americans, which makes up less than one-quarter of the overall budget.

“An earlier deal was struck to extend the Bush tax cuts for just two years, which increased the deficit by $858 billion. More than $500 billion of that deal constituted tax cuts, with billions more funding business tax breaks and a reduction in the estate tax. Roughly $56 billion went to reauthorize emergency unemployment benefits.

“So, less than two months after signing tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans into law, Obama proposes a budget that attacks programs that help the working poor and the most needy heat their homes, expand their access to graduate-level education, put their kids in Head Start, [and fund] summer jobs for youth, career development, after-school programs, child care, GED programs, affordable housing through cuts in Section 8 vouchers and public housing assistance, homelessness prevention, housing court advocacy, food pantries, access to tax credits, senior programs and more.”

JO COMERFORD
Comerford is executive director of the National Priorities Project. She said today that military spending, “which accounts for roughly 58 percent of discretionary spending and 20 percent of total federal spending (both based on FY 2011 estimates), will continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace than in recent years. The administration proposes funding reductions of $78 billion over the next five years within the Department of Defense. The $553 billion base-line Department of Defense request is approximately 3 percent higher than current funding levels. This figure does not include funding for nuclear weapons or $117.6 billion for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Filed Under: The U.S. Economy, War: Info, Analysis, Policy Options Tagged With: budget,

Cost of War: Breaking It Down

January 12, 2011

Monday (January 17) is the 50th anniversary of President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, in which he warned of the rise of a “military-industrial complex.”
Martin Luther King Day is also Monday. He said: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
On Tuesday, the LA Times reported, Vice President Biden “backed away from his own recent promise that the U.S. would pull out of the country ‘come hell or high water’ by 2014.” Instead “conceding that the U.S. might retain a presence in Afghanistan when the 2014 deadline hits and beyond.”

JO COMERFORD, CHRIS HELLMAN
Comerford is executive director of the National Priorities Project; Hellman is budget analyst for the group, which as part of the re-launch of its website, CostofWar.com, has just issued “What’s at Stake?” — 50 state-level briefs focused on the impact of war spending. [Read more...]

Filed Under: War: Info, Analysis, Policy Options Tagged With: budget, children, head start, health insurance, renewable energy, war,

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