Massive Defense Spending Leads to Job Loss by Dean Baker

There is a major national ad campaign, funded by the oil industry and other usual suspects, to convince the public that measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and slow global warming will result in massive job loss. This ad campaign warns of slower growth and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, possibly even millions of jobs, if some variation of the current proposals being debated by Congress get passed into law.---[D]efense spending means that the government is pulling away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs. For some reason, no one has chosen to highlight the job loss associated with higher defense spending. In fact, the job loss attributable to defense spending has probably never been mentioned in a single news story in The New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio, or any other major media outlet. It is difficult to find a good explanation for this omission.
2 commentscategory: Military karma: 185

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  1. #1    Isn't it amazing how people don't comment on this oh-so-obvious fact?!
    written by Fiore since 10 days 18 hours 4 minutesFiore
  2. #2    Yeah well we can all go to work at our crappy jobs wearing Chinese-made inexpensive gas masks from WAL*MART...
    written by zelator since 10 days 17 hours 41 minuteszelator
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