Overall

Military spending has a special high status in the United States.  Because the military is held in such high esteem by the public there is an inherent reluctance by politicians and the press to challenge the military budget.  My research shows a huge negative impact on the manufacturing economy by military buildups.  Everything I see in the data shows that military spending is THE major cause of empire decline, social decay, and crime.  But the silence and denial are deafening about all this.  Keynesian economists often recognize the long-term erosion of the economy due to military spending but insist on the completely contradictory idea that military spending stimulates the economy in the short run.  This is ridiculous, like moonwalking toward a goal you will never reach, because you cannot walk backwards and end up going forward.  Because the political establishment follows the folly of the mainstream economists, the last three Democratic US presidents, Carter, Clinton, and Obama, have all started economically harmful military buildups in the last year they were in office and ended up electing the other party all three times.  People are so convinced that military spending is just like other government spending that they completely ignore thoughts about the long-term consequences and falsely accept the non-existent short-term positives.  Empirical evidence can be discounted because of the widespread false belief that economics is just too hard to predict well, and the social science belief that multifactor analysis is the only way to go, and that micro analysis can be built-up to explain the macro situation.  Because of all these false constructs entrenched in today's social structure, only my accurate new science can set the record straight and put an end to the false conclusions justifying militarism and empire.  The existing structures refuse to connect the military to manufacturing stagnation or crime and murder rates.  Military backgrounds are treated as neutral, so corruptions that come from them are unexamined and avoided.

Consequences

National leadership fails to understand the problem of lost economic opportunity due to shifting crucial resources away from productive manufacturing, construction, agriculture, and mining and into nonproductive military spending.  Military spending has considerable power and control potential yet lacks all but limited civilian research joint uses. The 90% of military spending that consists of payroll supplies and equipment gives national service with no viable economic civilian product.  In the area of crime too much focus on guns and human nature ignores the direct relationship between military training to kill, alienation from humans considered other or enemies, and desperation due to the slow economy and stagnation of empire.  Leaders falsely consider that a large army makes a nation strong, when in fact it tends to make a nation weaker all too soon.  Military spending is thought of as foreign policy so much that the domestic problem is ignored.  Military background is all too rarely considered despite many mass murderers and warrior cops.  We do not see the attitude (demonization) and training (to kill easily and quickly) as facilitating the usual 2% of the military with the deviant tendency to pursue crime.  Military spending has an obvious impact on localities, what is not obvious is the drain on research and capital resources away from the normal civilian good producing economy.  That makes military spending a transfer of resources from one region to another, not a net gain or loss of jobs, just a loss of output, as powerful goods producing resources are turned into a mere provision of services.  High military spending has systematically eroded manufacturing to be replaced by financial services, increasingly corrupt politics, and crime, income inequality, and poor health over the course of time in an empire society.

Actors In the Military Game

Military spending is "thought" to magically appear where it is spent coming out of thin air.  The money going into military spending is tracked and observed easily and the concept of "opportunity cost" is apparently better understood in business than economics.  There is a kind of "flat earth" narrowness of perception that does not understand that military money can not be separated from the allocation of scarce key resources.  Ruth Sivard's work clearly shows that the leading European powers and US over a twenty year period have the same combined total of capital investment and military spending,  Thus her work shows that military spending reduces capital investment representing lost capital investment to the economy as a whole.  Most politicians see what happens in their state or district and do not see the big national picture where manufacturing jobs are lost in military buildups and restored during military build-downs like the sixties, nineties, and after the end of the Iraq War.  Businesspeople know that where you assign the employees and capital is where you get the results.  Spending on economic growth or military power gets you either achievement improvements or political power.  Economists tend to see money spent and think it does not matter what it is spent on, economic growth results either way.  They buy the Keynesian notion that one group of people could dig holes, and another fill those holes up, and paying them represents economic growth both ways.  That is nonsense, what you do does matter, Roosevelt improved natural parks and built buildings with his job programs, he did not waste the money.  In Madison Wisconsin where I live, a half dozen MAJOR buildings around town were built in the year 1938, for instance.  Politicians often settle for small amounts in the low military states in deals with big money military contractor states.  In 2004 a Wisconsin US Senator got a $7 million dollar milk price support deal for the dairy state while the state lost a thousand times that amount for net of federal taxes military spending of $9 BILLION drained from the state.  Thanks to the progressive nature of empire decay and militarism, US manufacturing jobs have gone from 40% in 1950 to 20% in 1980 to 10% in 2010, a scientific half-life of 30 years since the onset of high military spending "empire" since the end of World War II in 1945, 75 years of empire until this year 2020.  In fairness to Keynes, military spending was only three percent of the British Empire economy between the world wars, while the US spent eight percent during the Cold War ended in 1991.  Thus Keynes did not have modern data to document his theory perhaps leading to the military Keynesian error.  Politics took over from economics during the Cold War.

Conclusion

The large military spending of the second World War, Reagan military buildup, and Cold War together with modern statistics makes it possible to see the reality of the military economy.  Too short and too small of changes can lead to misleading results, but the longer and stronger the economy and military spending the more clear-cut the picture.  This is the advantage my work (1985-2020) has over the Keynes work in 1936.  The shear power of military money has created a cult of silence about serious (not token) impacts of military spending.  Long hours watching politics on television usually understates the largely unknown impacts of the military on most of modern society.  The opportunity to cut the military budget is a rare mention if at all for presidential and congressional candidates.  That is downplaying, whispering past the elephant in the room.

Basics of the Economic Model:

https://www.academia.edu/5558307/ACCURATE_ECONOMICS_MODEL_US_18ppt_3p._2014

Please cite this work as follows:  Reuschlein, Robert. (2020, July 1), "Downplaying Military Budget" Madison, WI, Real Economy Institute.  Retrieved from:  https://www.expertclick.com/NewsRelease/Downplaying-Military-Budget,2020232772.aspx

Dr. Peace, Professor Robert Reuschlein, Real Economy Institute, Nobel Peace Prize nominee 2016-2020 with accelerating interest from Norway.  Intense interest in an unusually consistent pattern shows up on my website as following my work, hard looks per year went from 2 to 3 to 48 to 128 to 219 (projected).

Contact: bobreuschlein@gmail.com  Info: www.realeconomy.com