President Joe Biden rolled out his proposal for the 2023 fiscal year budget Monday. It’s a big one—$5.8 trillion altogether, with $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending. The biggest single slice is $813 billion for the military, with $773 billion for the Pentagon and half of the remaining $40 billion going to modernizing nuclear weapons and related matters.
In some quarters, of course, this morbidly obese defense spending proposal will be pilloried for being inadequate. National Review Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowry, for instance, is one of the people drooling for a trillion-dollar defense budget. The last time someone called for that was in 1980. Michael Kroenig of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security says the U.S. “could go so far as to double its defense spending.” That would mean an annual defense budget of $1.6 trillion.
Despite the headlines and the caterwauling of the right, we already have a national defense budget of nearly $1 trillion when what’s appropriated for the Veterans Administration (VA) is included, which it certainly should be. Biden’s proposal would give the VA $161 billion.
Compare this to the $44.9 billion proposed to address the climate crisis. That’s a $16 billion increase over the 2021 budget. (Comparative figures for 2022 aren’t yet available.) Sounds huge and, historically speaking, it is. Most welcome is the $11 billion proposed to help other nations address climate impacts. But the overall increase is half the proposed $31 billion increase in Pentagon spending. The total proposed to address climate? Less than 5% of the budget for national defense.
In the October 2015 Democratic presidential debates when Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked what he thought was the biggest threat to national security, he didn’t hesitate: climate change. “The scientific community is telling us that if we do not address the global crisis of climate change, transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy, the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable,” he said. “That is a major crisis.”
The only thing that’s changed since then is that we know the crisis is worse than we thought, with the harmful impacts becoming more fast-paced than many scientists expected. Words in the matter still outweigh action.
Listen to Meteor Blades, Mark Sumner, and Markos Moulitsas discuss our country’s dependence on dictator oil on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast
Embedded Content
On Monday, Sanders was right again when he said: “At a time when we are already spending more on the military than the next 11 countries combined, no we do not need a massive increase in the defense budget.”
William D. Hartung, Nick Cleveland-Stout, and Taylor Giorno at the Tom Dispatch write:
Hartung has more here.
In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned that the nation should “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Lots of people have invoked those words, written essays and published books about it. Think tanks and grassroots organizations have worked to lessen the power of that complex, which includes Congress and a big chunk of academia. But it is more potent than ever. As the chart above illustrates, military spending may retreat slightly on occasion, but it always comes back yet higher, and only a few in Congress on both sides of the aisle object.
No need to reiterate all the ins and outs of the Build Back Better climate and social spending plan. The original proposed funding was halved, and that was halved again to please Sen. Joe Manchin, who nixed key elements of that plan so that he could push an obsolete (and lethal) “all-of-the-above” energy plan that personally benefits him and his fossil fuel campaign contributors. Then he said no anyway. Fed up with his pretend negotiations, the House of Representatives narrowly passed a Build Back Better bill in November. Now Manchin wants to talk again. And even though he has repeatedly burned Democratic negotiators with his self-interested opposition to Build Back Better, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal says she’s willing to talk with him again. Last December she said, "We will never stop fighting to truly build back better for the American people. Too much is at stake."
Indeed. Ultimately, a bill with climate provisions may still pass. Maybe it will even come close to the $555 billion passed by the House. That would be far more than has ever been targeted on the climate crisis—it’s half what’s being proposed for the military this coming year. Except the military budget is for a year, and that $555 billion is to be spread over a decade during which the military would spend $10 trillion if budgets stay flat until 2033, which they almost certainly will not.
Politicians across the spectrum have no problem voting every year for a trillion-dollar defense budget. But propose a matching trillion dollars a year invested in climate defense? Outrageous, they will say. “Fiscal insanity,” as Manchin would have it.
Obviously, we’re not going to get anywhere near $1 trillion a year for climate defense, for taking on what Sanders so rightly called the biggest threat to national security. Climate hawks have been told for decades to be realistic and patient.
But there are two realities: One is the razor-thin partisan margin in Congress that allows one senator to enable the scores of outright climate science deniers elected to that body. The other comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent Sixth Assessment of Climate that labels our current situation “code red for humanity.” Funding efforts to prevent, adapt to, and ameliorate the impacts of climate change at 5% as much as we fund the military illustrates our priorities quite clearly. And so far, even that level of funding hasn’t happened.
In some quarters, of course, this morbidly obese defense spending proposal will be pilloried for being inadequate. National Review Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowry, for instance, is one of the people drooling for a trillion-dollar defense budget. The last time someone called for that was in 1980. Michael Kroenig of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security says the U.S. “could go so far as to double its defense spending.” That would mean an annual defense budget of $1.6 trillion.
Despite the headlines and the caterwauling of the right, we already have a national defense budget of nearly $1 trillion when what’s appropriated for the Veterans Administration (VA) is included, which it certainly should be. Biden’s proposal would give the VA $161 billion.
Compare this to the $44.9 billion proposed to address the climate crisis. That’s a $16 billion increase over the 2021 budget. (Comparative figures for 2022 aren’t yet available.) Sounds huge and, historically speaking, it is. Most welcome is the $11 billion proposed to help other nations address climate impacts. But the overall increase is half the proposed $31 billion increase in Pentagon spending. The total proposed to address climate? Less than 5% of the budget for national defense.
In the October 2015 Democratic presidential debates when Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked what he thought was the biggest threat to national security, he didn’t hesitate: climate change. “The scientific community is telling us that if we do not address the global crisis of climate change, transform our energy system away from fossil fuel to sustainable energy, the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable,” he said. “That is a major crisis.”
The only thing that’s changed since then is that we know the crisis is worse than we thought, with the harmful impacts becoming more fast-paced than many scientists expected. Words in the matter still outweigh action.
Listen to Meteor Blades, Mark Sumner, and Markos Moulitsas discuss our country’s dependence on dictator oil on Daily Kos’ The Brief podcast
Embedded Content
On Monday, Sanders was right again when he said: “At a time when we are already spending more on the military than the next 11 countries combined, no we do not need a massive increase in the defense budget.”
William D. Hartung, Nick Cleveland-Stout, and Taylor Giorno at the Tom Dispatch write:
Hartung has more here.
In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower warned that the nation should “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Lots of people have invoked those words, written essays and published books about it. Think tanks and grassroots organizations have worked to lessen the power of that complex, which includes Congress and a big chunk of academia. But it is more potent than ever. As the chart above illustrates, military spending may retreat slightly on occasion, but it always comes back yet higher, and only a few in Congress on both sides of the aisle object.
No need to reiterate all the ins and outs of the Build Back Better climate and social spending plan. The original proposed funding was halved, and that was halved again to please Sen. Joe Manchin, who nixed key elements of that plan so that he could push an obsolete (and lethal) “all-of-the-above” energy plan that personally benefits him and his fossil fuel campaign contributors. Then he said no anyway. Fed up with his pretend negotiations, the House of Representatives narrowly passed a Build Back Better bill in November. Now Manchin wants to talk again. And even though he has repeatedly burned Democratic negotiators with his self-interested opposition to Build Back Better, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal says she’s willing to talk with him again. Last December she said, "We will never stop fighting to truly build back better for the American people. Too much is at stake."
Indeed. Ultimately, a bill with climate provisions may still pass. Maybe it will even come close to the $555 billion passed by the House. That would be far more than has ever been targeted on the climate crisis—it’s half what’s being proposed for the military this coming year. Except the military budget is for a year, and that $555 billion is to be spread over a decade during which the military would spend $10 trillion if budgets stay flat until 2033, which they almost certainly will not.
Politicians across the spectrum have no problem voting every year for a trillion-dollar defense budget. But propose a matching trillion dollars a year invested in climate defense? Outrageous, they will say. “Fiscal insanity,” as Manchin would have it.
Obviously, we’re not going to get anywhere near $1 trillion a year for climate defense, for taking on what Sanders so rightly called the biggest threat to national security. Climate hawks have been told for decades to be realistic and patient.
But there are two realities: One is the razor-thin partisan margin in Congress that allows one senator to enable the scores of outright climate science deniers elected to that body. The other comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent Sixth Assessment of Climate that labels our current situation “code red for humanity.” Funding efforts to prevent, adapt to, and ameliorate the impacts of climate change at 5% as much as we fund the military illustrates our priorities quite clearly. And so far, even that level of funding hasn’t happened.