President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth
This increase is huge by any measure. It comes to around $4,600 per household. It is around eight percent of the total budget. This spending request dwarfs sums that are often the subject of major debates in Washington.
For example, last year, Democrats pushed to have the enhanced subsidies in the Affordable Care Act exchanges extended. This would have cost $30 billion a year, one twentieth of what Trump and Hegseth are demanding.
People may recall Elon Musk gleefully putting the USAID into the “wood chipper” last spring. While ending this program is expected to lead to four million additional deaths over the next four years, it only saved around $35 billion a year. That is less than six percent of the increase in military spending that Trump is asking for.
The annual cost of extending the enhanced child tax credit, which cut child poverty in half, was around $100 billion a year, less than one-fifth of Trump’s proposed increase. And the annual appropriation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was $550 million, less than one thousandth of the additional spending for the military that Trump is demanding. (It’s in the chart, just small to see.)
People need to know that Trump’s military spending request is really big money, compared to almost anything else that ever comes up for public debate for Congress. Unfortunately, because of incompetent or corrupt budget reporting, few news accounts make any effort to put these huge numbers in a context that makes them understandable for their audience. As a result, most people will probably have little idea of what is at stake with this military request.
Any self-proclaimed deficit hawk who is not all hair on fire about Trump’s budget demand is a lying hypocrite who only uses concerns about the deficit to argue against programs they don’t like. We got along fine with the former level of military spending, which almost everyone, including Donald Trump in his first term, considered adequate.
Is the argument that in just 18 months in office, Trump has made the world so much less safe that we have to increase the defense budget by two-thirds? Most of us knew that making our former allies into enemies was not a good idea, but Trump is placing a huge price tag on this mistake. And remember, this is Trump’s own number, not his critics’.
Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.
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