The big-money rent-seekers in the military industrial complex have been lobbying hard against cuts to the defense budgets. The so-called “super-committee” – the group of representatives tasked with deciding where to cut – have been the target for that lobbying. Unfortunately, those representatives come from states where the some of the biggest military contractors build missiles, aircraft, jet fighters and tanks while employing tens of thousands of workers. That has long been a strategy of defense firms: to spread manufacturing bases of employment around the country to make cuts politically unpalatable to key politicians.
But those jobs are not the kind that really get the economy moving and boost productivity. They’re the kind that get their salaries from taxpayers who otherwise would have spent or saved it in productive ways and then build bombs, which only destroy instead of produce.
And that brings us to the new post from Robert Greenwald and Derek Crowe at War Costs pushing against this idea that military spending is good for job creation. It isn’t.
Reported by Ernest Hancock
Just The Messenger 