The Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think
By Robert Higgs, The Independent Institute
When President Bush signed the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2004 on November 24, 2003, the event received considerable attention in the news media. At $401.3 billion, the public's visible cost of funding the nation's defense seemed to be reaching astronomical heights, and the president took pains to justify that enormous cost by linking it to the horrors of 9/11 and to the “war on terror.” He pledged that “we will do whatever it takes to keep our nation strong, to keep the peace, and to keep the American people secure,” clearly implying that such payoffs would accrue from the expenditures and other measures that the act authorizes.
Although the public may appreciate that $401.3 billion is a great deal of money, few citizens realize that it is only part of the total bill for defense. Lodged elsewhere in the budget, other lines identify funding that serves defense purposes just as surely as -- sometimes even more surely than -- the money allocated to the Department of Defense (DoD). On occasion, commentators take note of some of these additional defense-related budget items, such as the nuclear-weapons activities of the Department of Energy (DoE), but many such items, including some extremely large ones, remain generally unrecognized.
Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), many observers probably would agree that its budget ought to be included in any complete accounting of defense costs. After all, the homeland is what most of us want the government to defend in the first place.
Many other agencies, such as the Department of Justice and the Department of Transportation, also spend money in pursuit of homeland security. According to the government's budget documents (Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2004, Table S-5), in fiscal year 2002, all such agencies together added approximately 50 percent to the amount spent on homeland security by the agencies later incorporated into the DHS.
Much of the budget for the Department of State and for international assistance programs ought to be classified as defense-related, too. In this case, the money serves to buy off potential enemies and to reward friendly governments who assist U.S. efforts to abate perceived threats. A great deal of U.S. foreign aid, currently more than $4 billion annually, takes the form of “foreign military financing,” and even funds placed under the rubric of economic development may serve defense-related purposes indirectly.
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