Study: Funding Progressive Domestic Priorities Creates At Least 50 Percent More Jobs Than Military Spending
Facing deep spending cuts, the Department of Defense, including Secretary Leon Panetta, and military-industrial trade associations have complained that tightening the U.S. security budget will cause greater unemployment. And even while toeing the (dubious) conservative line that government spending cannot create jobs, right wingers like Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA) insist that military spending must stay high to keep unemployment from increasing.
But a new study (PDF) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, highlighted by economist Dean Baker shows that, contra the conservative talking point, non-military spending can create more jobs than money going to defense programs. The study’s authors, economists Robert Pollin and Heidi Garret-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute, used statistics from the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources to deduce how many jobs are created by public spending in various arenas. Among them, military spending was the lowest, creating fewer jobs per billion dollars spent than even consumer-oriented tax cuts.
Here’s a chart from the study showing how many jobs each area produced from a billion dollars in spending:
See TP for the chart and for a link to the report.