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TechnoratiThe Secret About Jobs Military Contractors Don't Want You to Know
Signs of a longer-term decline in real wages are also troubling: The 2001 recession was the first in which median incomes didn't bounce back afterward. A recent AFL-CIO report shows that only 31% of those under 35 make enough to cover their bills—and that the rates of unemployment and underemployment are much higher for younger workers.
At the same time, the United States is still mired in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. government spent an estimated $624 billion on the military, plus $188 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008. This is about 12 times what the U.S. spent on education in 2008.
So we have billions of dollars going toward wars without a foreseeable end-point or concrete benefit, and thousands of U.S. citizens without jobs. Congress has long argued to keep military projects in their districts because they keep constituents employed. But is the military really the best way to create jobs?
Researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst asked in a new study: What if the government took some of the money going toward the military and spent it instead on jobs in other sectors?
Commissioned by the Institute for Policy Studies and Women's Action for New Directions, the report shows that the federal government could generate thousands more jobs, both directly and indirectly, by focusing spending on health care, education, or clean energy rather than on defense.
"The study focuses on the employment effects of military spending versus alternative domestic spending priorities, in particular investments in clean energy, health care, and education," write the authors. "We show that investments in clean energy, health care and education create a much larger number of jobs across all pay ranges. Channeling funds into clean energy, health care, and education in an effective way will therefore create significantly greater opportunities for decent employment throughout the U.S. economy than spending the same amount of funds with the military."
For $1 billion, researchers found, the government could create 7,100 military jobs, 7,500 clean energy jobs, 10,400 health care jobs, and 16,900 education jobs. If Congress is serious about ending this recession, it's clear they need to take a closer look at the job creation potential of our taxpayer dollars.
To read the full report, "The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities: An Updated Analysis," click here.
11 Comments so far
Show All"Dianne Feinstein: War Profiteer. Why a San Francisco Democrat is one of the biggest warmongers around",
by Justin Raimondo, Oct 12 2009
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/10/11/dianne-feinstein-war-profiteer
Senator Feinstein, D-Calif., has quite an interesting story to know about her, and her rich financier husband, who's a majority owner in Perini Corp., which apparently is the Halliburton of the Dem. Party, and URS Corp., both of which stand to make a LOT of money from reconstruction in Afghanistan and maybe also Iraq. I forget if Justin Raimondo mentions Iraq, but definitely Afghanistan; and talking of a LOT of money. Her husband's been majority owner in these two cies from 1997 to 2005, while she was on the Senate's Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee, apparently as a very influential member on that subcommittee. She's pushing for escalation of the war in afghanistan, today, so it's likely, if not certainly, for this reason, which she of course wouldn't want to admit.
How many other senators and Congress members are in important, key positions relating to war profiting corporations? There apparently are or would be many. Justin Raimondo provides relevant links.
They can steal U.S. taxpayers' dollars to fund all of this racket and then if most Americans wind up in third-world poverty, it won't matter much, if at all. After all, the population of the USA is only around 5% of the total human population. There'll be lots of profits to be made from populations of other countries.
They might want to offshore their U.S. HQ's though, to stay safe from a lot of angry Americans.
LIFE:How can life be when there are not the means for health and living for all not just the few?
LIBERTY:Where is there liberty in a patriot act that is antethesis to a liberty that is true freedom and not just words?
PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS:What is happiness to the many who have not?How can one pursue a word,a sentence when there are never sufficient to nurture a body and Soul? Today is to look back and see that even when written they were empty words.Tony
I'm not comfortable with arguements like those presented in this article.
If money spent on militarism WAS more efficient in creating jobs than money spent in other ways, would it then be OK to slaughter innocent people in other countries?
No, because there are negative moral implications when you turn it around. I understand reversing it is no good, but it's an effective argument and good to know. I mean, you could say that some of that money could be diverted to social spending, generally, and it's also a good argument. Really, it's a great way to get people to look at it differently as people tend to be desensitized to war or feel helpless to stop it. This just gives people more perspective.
If we were to spend most of "our" money on projects that promoted citizens/humanity then we would surely lift ourselves from a position of servile indebtedness to one of great independence from the corporate-government (c-g).
The c-g doesn't want that because they will have less money/less control over the "unwashed masses".
Hence the ceaseless propagandized media which assists the c-g in keeping the money/decisions out of our reach.
Long story short; The c-g fears a healthy, educated, organized, economically and energy independent "us".
The c-g will not give up their advantage. We will have to politically pry it from their cold, greedy hands.
Oh, I see... If we just tinkered with the imperialist machine, everything would be alright. I would call it naive from a teenager, but from a mature person it amounts to treachery. There does not exist a capitalist paradigm that can bring an end to war and poverty. ...Not even in theory! Ms. Doak must know this, but says nothing. What does that make her?
There are only international communist solutions to the problems of war and poverty. To suggest simething else is to propose a flat world.
//the federal government could generate thousands more jobs, both directly and indirectly, by focusing spending on health care, education, or clean energy rather than on defense.//
the governement = the people could print "coupons" = "money" and pay some of the people to do whatever the people knows, thinks, believes need to be done. Like cleaning the garbage patches in the seas, like help snow tigers survive extinction, like building extraordinary beautiful houses for everybody, like writing poems about bald eagles, like building gigantic spaces stations-places for one hundred billion people to live in.
It's up to us, damn it!
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This is the first time in a long time I have ever come across such an article. The truth is this ties into what's wrong with country whether we're talking about health care, jobs, environment, you name it. There are some additional information the Ms. Doak has not provided but must be mentioned. This is where taking an issue and connecting it to another comes in handy. Not mentioned are the rising costs of living which affects everyone, employed and unemployed. If everything rises in expenses, more people will want more money and jobs that are likely to stay longer. I don't know what it will take to make non-DoD jobs more robust, stable, and secure but perhaps we might want to examine the cause. What we have here is a hostage crisis on jobs. Is it the military alone that's holding this country's economy hostage or is there company? As I read the comments on this site daily and assess the current events throughout my area, I realize that it's not the military alone but the financial goons that actually control both the politicians and the military. I still cannot forget the story JWVerez shared the other day on a neighbor of his desperate to sign up just to keep up with his bills when there's no good job to help him and I'll bet that there are millions like him who are even less fortunate to get assistance and be pulled out of lucrative deals being generated from the war machine oiled by the the financial goons. For years, a lot of us don't know which to be a sucker at, not taking that offer and staying poor or taking that offer and getting some money with blood being spread to your hands.
More than anything, what the progressives and liberals need to do is engage in economic populism and be honest about it. Just giving a fake illusion on the campaign trail and then backstabbing once the election is over only gives people the wrong feeling and pushes them in the wrong direction. How many conservative voters would have voted progressive/liberal had the populism stayed instead of evaporated? How many people working as contractors related to the military, telecom, banks, insurance, law, church, etc ... would have worked in clean energy, education, non-profit health care, etc ... had there been a long term populist movement? How many of us who are employeed and non-union would have joined a union had there been a genuine populist appeal on labor and unions just like there used to be in the late 19th century all the way up to WWII?
I know some people will say that I should just give up my job if I want to help. Convenient and easy for some to say but we're in a system where I could give up and someone else would step in immediately. It would take millions to do the same thing and even then the effect would be temporary at best. This would be like trying to put out a building fire when the cause of the fire is volcanic lava from underneath the Earth's surface that's keeping the flames alive. We could poor millions of gallons of water all over the pouring lava but that would not hold back Mother Nature for long. What we need are strategies to redirecting funding and job growth from mainly military to domestic sectors. The good news is some companies including mine are continuously shifting to it. VA may have lower levels of unemployment compared to most states but how many people can put up with wasting hours in heavy traffic when there could be more local jobs and growth as some here have called for? Even with Obama's increase in defense spending, there is a lot of pressure inside a lot of companies to take the money given by government and shift efforts towards working with local business customers who in turn can provide jobs and stop the bleeding. To keep this going though, I recommend that more people keep the pressure on the local and state leaders and not ignore those elections as well in addition to keeping the pressure on the companies you work for where you can.
If we banded together....
"So we have billions of dollars going toward wars without a foreseeable end-point..."
That's the way things are, and will be until this country financially collapses. Until that time we will be at perpetual war. If we ever get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we'll start a war somewhere else.
It's how the vested interests make the big bucks to bribe the politicians with, so they will give the vested interests juicy contracts, so the special interests can give more bribes to the politicians...
And the sun rises in the east, sets in the west, rises in the east, sets in the west, rises...
Tom 11:07 very, very sad but very very true.
I guess USA ans will not wake up until the Authorities start reprimanding them in Mandarin.