President Trump recently announced his plan to increase military spending by a whopping $54 billion. This 9-percent increase in spending on munitions would come at the cost of government programs in education, poverty mitigation and the environment.
While I am all for mitigating government spending, adding the cut money to the military budget is ridiculous. The United States’ military is already overgrown. Flooding this much more cash into the armed forces will only let Trump puff out his chest while the war hawk Republicans stare at him in admiration.
In 2015, the military took up 54 percent of the United States’ $1.11 trillion federal discretionary spending.
The next largest category by percentage was a five-way tie between the cost of running the government, education, Medicare and health, veterans’ benefits, and community management. Each of these five programs accounts for only six percent of the discretionary spending.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see the gross $70 billion we spend federally on education or Medicare slashed, but these issues are mere drops in the bucket compared to the ocean of guns and soldiers we pay for. Trump only wants to make the mountain bigger.
Luckily, Bill Hoagland, once a Republican budget aide in the Senate who now serves as the senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, doesn’t think Trump’s plan has a leg to stand on. He told the New York Times that “it is a proposal ... that will be dead on arrival even within a Republican Congress.”
Because Trump wants to fund this $54 billion price tag exclusively through cutting other government programs, entire departments would have to be removed. The likelihood of Congress, even a right-leaning Congress, agreeing to slash so much of the budget is far-fetched.
I’d love to see this $54 billion cut from our bloated government.
The money, however, should be returned to taxpayers rather than simply reallocated to some other government inefficiency. Ideally, a large majority of that $54 billion cut would come straight out of the military budget.
Trump’s desire for a larger military worries me. With his desire to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, his distaste for NATO and his desire to tax imports from other countries, Trump’s is painting a picture of an economically isolationist United States with a gigantic military.
We can’t close our borders to trade and immigration while increasing the largest military in the world by nine percent. Not only is this a gigantic waste of money and poor resource allocation, it sends a terrible message to other countries. We look scared, xenophobic and authoritarian.
My favorite word when it comes to government budgets is “slash,” but if Trump wants to cut smaller social programs to add to the largest, most overgrown money sink in the United States, be sure to count me out.
dylmoore@umail.iu.edu
