If I may offer a reasoned, if Chumpskyan (?) point of view on the subject:
There’s plenty of reason to want to lower defense spending. The reasons are as follows:
1 - The tax cut. Assuming conservatives like their tax cuts, and we know you do, those cuts have to be paid for somehow. Sua, your point on discretionary spending is technically correct but in the real world holds no water. Social Security, Medicare, interstate highways, and airports are financed through trust funds which have taxes dedicated to their financing. Defense and the other programs lumped in under discretionary spending are financed through non-dedicated taxes, mostly personal and corporate income taxes, along with excise taxes, customs duties, and maybe some other taxes I don’t know about. So if you want to cut the income tax, then you also have to look to cut that which the tax finances if you don’t want to find yourself in a hole.
2 - Defense is the largest piece of spending financed through the above non-dedicated taxes.
Data is at: http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/01statab/stat-ab01.html, section 9, Federal Government Finances and Employment.
The calculation gets a bit hairy because of the unified budget that gets presented. This is, btw, strictly a political device thought up because since the Social Security trust fund has a large surplus, that surplus can cover up the deficit being run elsewhere. When the trust fund was in deficit, it was separated from the budget so that its deficit wouldn’t make the budget look worse.
That said, here’s how it looks for that piece paid for outside of trust fund sources:
National defense: 299.1
Income security: 262.6
Net interest: 206.4 (net of the amount paid for by the aforementioned trust funds)
…and on it goes. The above are the big three though.
It should be noted that the defense figure doesn’t include the amount spent on veterans’ benefits, which one could argue really belongs in the same line item if we’re debating the total defense bill. That amounts to 45.4 billion. Taken together, these amount to 344.5 billion.
As for the receipts which pay for this, they are, in order of size:
Individual Income Taxes: 1072.9
Corporation Income Taxes: 213.1
Excise Taxes: 71.1
Clearly, defense is easily affordable given the 2001 level of taxes. Without the veterans department, it amounts to 22% of spending from these sources, with the veterans department it amounts to 25%. But as we have an ongoing tax cut regime, with more tax cuts being demanded almost hourly, it seems, it may not be in the future. Besides the already passed tax cut, we have a call for speeding up its benefits, a call for ending the double taxation of dividends (which BTW, I’m for, for reasons way too complex to get into here), calls to end the corporate income tax altogether, and Democrats calling for a payroll tax holiday, a thing which doesn’t directly affect the above of course, but it just goes to show how the air is full of enthusiastic calls for cutting taxes.
Does something have to give? In my opinion, yes, because the deficit is already out of control. Look at http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpenny.htm, a site which gives the debt, as they say, down to the penny. Look at the net increase in this debt from 2001 to 2002: 421 billion dollars, rounded to the nearest billion, by my calculation. This is the true deficit. That increase amounts to 4% of GDP. Can we keep growing the debt by 4% of GDP every single year? I don’t think so.
3 - The economic argument. Yes defense spending stimulates the economy in the areas where the money is spent. No, the net effect is not positive. No way.
Any transfer of money, whether it be for Social Security or for defense, to name the two biggest, from economically active and innovative areas to economically inert areas is always, always bad. Given that there is no such thing as a base or a fort that exports a product that others are willing to pay for, they are by definition economically inert. Ditto for defense procurement, which simply buys things which have no useful economic function once they’ve been bought. If the NYC Transit Authority buys a subway train, that train is put into service and for years will take large numbers of people to and from work. If the Defense Department buys a jet, that jet does no work which has a direct economic benefit. That doesn’t mean we don’t need the jet; it simply means that we have to consider carefully the outlays for items like this, because the net economic effect is not nearly as beneficial as it would be for the train. In the aggregate, of course. Any one individual jet can save quite a lot if it prevents an attack on our soil, which leads us to number
4 - This one’s for Chumpsky: when considering how much to spend for defense, you also have to take into account what is saved. Our overwhelming military advantage means that no sane nation would ever think of attacking us, or any nation to which we are allied, for that matter. Only the occasional clever terrorist can get through. That’s a lot of office buildings, factories, warehouses, and homes that are still standing because no attack of any real size has ever been launched by another nation against us. Yes, we had the WTC and Oklahoma City. But so far, those have been isolated instances. Which brings us to
5 - The armed forces are useless for preventing terrorist attacks. At the very least, we should cut out some of the money currently going to the DoD and redirect it to intelligence. And get some more intelligence into our use of intelligence. Increasing the defense budget, which I believe our president is proposing, is as crystal clear a case of fighting the last war as ever there was.