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Yesterday, Cato released a new video
pointing out that the military spending cuts specified under the Budget
Control Act’s sequestration provision are not large relative to total
spending, and would still have the U.S. government spending nearly $5.2
trillion on the Pentagon’s base budget over the next ten years. Under
sequestration, the average annual total, $472 billion in constant, 2012
dollars, is well above the level spent during the 1990s (average $422
billion), and comparable even to what we spent during much of the Cold
War. The video (building on my and Ben Friedman’s earlier writing,
especially here) spells out the strategic rationale for even deeper cuts.
In a new paper
released today, economist Benjamin Zycher outlines some of the economic
rationales for such cuts. He shows that cuts on the order of $100
billion per year over ten years can be reasonably expected to reduce
economic costs by $135 billion — provided that the funds are redirected
to the private sector and not simply plowed into other government
spending. Zycher concedes that the demand for U.S. military spending has
declined, and its value (measured in what we actually spend) should
also decline. At a minimum, he concludes, “These potential savings in
real resources are sufficiently large to justify a detailed analysis of
U.S. national security needs and the outlays required to defend them.”
Zycher’s findings should help to set the record straight on some of
the more outrageous statements pertaining to sequestration, particularly
the claims of massive job losses and economic devastation. The study
that has attracted the most attention, by George Mason University
Professor Stephen Fuller, alleged that a reduction of just $45 billion
in procurement spending would result in a decline of about $86.5 billion
in GDP in 2013, and the loss of over one million full-time equivalent
jobs (1,006,315, to be precise). Fuller updated his findings last month
and now concludes
that the automatic cuts under sequestration, both defense and
non-defense, will reduce the nation’s GDP by $215 billion, and cost 2.14
million jobs.
There are at least two major problems with Fuller’s research (and
others like it), one methodological, the other conceptual. Zycher
scrutinizes them both.
The primary methodological flaw is
Fuller’s grossly inflated assumptions about the multiplier effects of
defense spending, in particular, and government spending generally. The
supposed economic effects above imply a multiplier of 1.92, whereas the
recent peer-reviewed economics literature shows multipliers of between
0.6 and 0.8. Zycher observes: a multiplier effect of less than 1.0
“suggests strongly that increases in defense spending (and government
spending more generally) have effects on GDP that are offset by
reductions in other economic activity.”
The conceptual problem of proclaiming that defense spending is good
for the economy, and cuts are bad, flows logically from the different
assumptions about the multiplier. Fuller and others focus narrowly on
the particular industries either affected by cuts. But these cuts should
free up resources elsewhere. To be sure, there are likely to be
temporary dislocations for some workers and businesses. These will be
difficult for the individuals and firms affected, but the economy as a
whole will benefit as skills and resources are redirected to more
productive activities.
These conclusions shouldn’t really surprise, and they should be
common-sense for Republicans who are generally skeptical of Keynesian
arguments for using government spending to stimulate the economy. After
all, every dollar spent by the government — federal, state or local — is
extracted from the private sector. Advocates for higher taxes and more
government spending claim that individuals in Congress, state capitols
and city halls are wise enough to know where these resources should be
spent. Conservatives and libertarians point out that this attempt to
pick winners and losers will fail more often than it succeeds, and the
net result is a less productive economy. The principle applies equally
when the money is spent by government agency A (e.g. the Department of
Agriculture) vs. government agency B (e.g. the Department of Defense).
In fact, it costs more than a dollar to send a dollar to the
government because of the excess burden of taxation, a process
documented by a number of economists, including Harvard’s Martin
Feldstein. The tax system imposes costs on the economy by discouraging
economic activity, including both work and investment, that would
otherwise occur in the absence of those taxes. Feldstein finds that
higher marginal tax rates generate an excess burden on the economy of
$0.76 for every additional dollar of revenue. Because “the taxes needed
to fund existing spending impose an excess burden smaller than the taxes
needed to fund increased spending,” Zycher conservatively estimates an
excess burden of 35 percent for current military expenditures.
Accordingly, he concludes, “a reduction in annual defense outlays of
$100 billion can be predicted with high confidence to increase the size
of the private sector by at least $135 billion per year.”
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