Liberals’ Defense-Spending Misdirection

L iberals have tested many different talking points to make it seem as if their reckless ambitions to pass $6 trillion in new spending over the course of President Biden’s first year in office are actually quite reasonable. They’ve claimed, with debt as a share of the economy set to eclipse the World War II record, that deficits don’t really matter, and they’ve asserted that a $3.5 trillion spending bill actually costs zero dollars. Now, they are dusting off a golden oldie by trying to argue that their agenda pales in comparison to what we spend on defense.

“It’s time to rethink our priorities,” the left-wing CAP Action tweeted, pointing to a graphic purportedly showing that the reconciliation bill costs less than half what is spent on defense.

Later in the day, Sahil Kapur, who used to write at the liberal TPM and is now at NBC, echoed the talking point, portraying it as offering “some context on price tags.”

His comparison, however, is not apples to apples. It’s more like apples to orangutans. What liberals are doing is a classic misdirection. They are taking an independently true fact and trying to use it as a distraction to downplay the outrageous cost of their preferred legislation.

The missing context is that the $700 billion-plus Pentagon figure includes all existing military spending as well as new spending. The figure for the Biden social-spending bill — averaged out to $350 billion in a single year — only includes new spending. It does not include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, or any other existing social-welfare programs.

In an honest comparison, the relevant number is the proposed increase in defense spending in the upcoming annual budget. On Monday, Senate Democrats proposed a $24 billion increase in the defense budget to $726 billion. So, if we were actually to compare apples to apples, it would mean that the $350 billion annual cost of Biden’s Build Back Better plan would be nearly 15 times the $24 billion cost of the proposed increase in the defense budget.

So an honest graphic would look like this:

If we wanted an apples-to-apples comparison to the $726 billion defense budget, it would take existing spending on social-welfare programs and other non-defense priorities and add Build Back Better to that. It would mean adding Social Security, health-care programs, and mandatory income-security programs (such as food stamps, the earned-income tax credit, welfare, and unemployment compensation). Other spending such as on housing assistance, transportation, and education is funded out of the discretionary portion of the federal budget. Adding all this spending up (and, to be fair, excluding the budget for Homeland Security) and piling on the $350 billion in proposed Build Back Better spending would mean $4.4 trillion in spending — or about six times the proposed defense budget.

To be sure, there is plenty of room to argue that the defense budget is too bloated and should be cut. Many fiscal conservatives would sign onto such a proposition. But liberals have consistently sought to portray matters as if the U.S. is skimping on social-welfare spending because of all the money we’re spending on weapons of war. Yet the reality is that, over time, defense has represented a smaller and smaller portion of the budget, which overwhelmingly goes to social programs. This can be seen dramatically in the following chart, from Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute.

It should also be noted that this understates the full U.S. commitment to social-welfare programs, because much of that spending — such as on education and health care — happens at the state level and is thus not reflected in any of these numbers, while defense spending is entirely done at the federal level.

Democrats are free to make an affirmative case for why it is necessary at a time of historic debt to drastically expand the social-welfare state. But it is simply dishonest to suggest that the current level of defense spending makes their extravagant ambitions suddenly reasonable.