{"id":12782,"date":"2011-11-15T09:44:31","date_gmt":"2011-11-15T17:44:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=12782"},"modified":"2011-11-15T09:44:31","modified_gmt":"2011-11-15T17:44:31","slug":"the-future-affordability-of-us-national-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2011\/11\/15\/the-future-affordability-of-us-national-security\/","title":{"rendered":"The Future Affordability of US National Security"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s the title of a timely paper by MIT researcher Dr. Cindy Williams [<a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/ssp\/people\/williams\/Williams_Tobin_paper_102811.pdf \">.pdf<\/a>]. The summary points:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1. The United States currently devotes about 4.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to national defense and another 1.5 percent to broader security efforts, including international affairs, homeland security, veterans&#8217; affairs, and intelligence.<\/p>\n<p>2. What share of GDP will be affordable for security over the long term depends on a variety of factors, including:<br \/>\n\u2013 Public perceptions of the security threat;<br \/>\n\u2013 The degree of debt-induced fiscal and economic risk policy makers are willing to run;<br \/>\n\u2013 The level of taxation the public is willing to bear;<br \/>\n\u2013 Whether and how much the costs of federal entitlement programs, particularly Medicare and Medicaid, can be reined in; and<br \/>\n\u2013 How much money is devoted to running the rest of the federal government.<\/p>\n<p>3. Putting federal budgets on a sustainable path will require shifting about six percent of GDP into revenues or out of spending, relative to their likely current course, according to the Congressional Budget Office.<\/p>\n<p>4. Depending on how that shift is distributed among taxation, entitlement spending, defense spending, and nondefense discretionary spending, an affordable long-term level for national defense will be between 1.6 percent and 2.6 percent of GDP.<\/p>\n<p>5. An affordable long-term level of total security spending might thus be between 2.1 percent and 3.4 percent of GDP.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/ssp\/people\/williams\/Williams_Tobin_paper_102811.pdf \">Read the rest here<\/a>. (Via Carl Conetta of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.comw.org\/pda\/\">Project on Defense Alternatives<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That&#8217;s the title of a timely paper by MIT researcher Dr. Cindy Williams [.pdf]. The summary points: 1. The United States currently devotes about 4.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to national defense and another 1.5 percent to broader security efforts, including international affairs, homeland security, veterans&#8217; affairs, and intelligence. 2. What share of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,167],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-12782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-spending","category-military-industrial-complex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12782"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12784,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12782\/revisions\/12784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12782"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}