War Costs Jobs: Ivy League Study Finds U.S. Domestic, Not Military Spending Creates More Jobs

21st Century Wire says…

War: What is it good for? We know it causes untold destruction and human despair around the world daily – by those who peddle it and carry it out from the highest ranks of government to their mainstream media cheerleaders.

A recent study, conducted by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, looked at a bloated $230 billion annual U.S. military spend and its opportunity costs to job growth in other sectors of the economy.

This is surely the most potent political message against the permanent war state: spending on infrastructure, renewable energy, health care and education would generates hundreds of thousands more jobs than war spending does https://t.co/vVPjAk2Pvs

— Gareth Porter (@GarethPorter) January 8, 2018

The study (“Job Opportunity Costs of War”), authored by University of Massachusetts, Amherst economist Heidi Garrett-Peltier compared how many jobs were created in domestic sectors of the U.S. economy – energy, infrastructure, health care, and education, and others – for every $1 million dollars of federal money spent on those sectors versus spent on defense. Garrett-Peltier used an “Input-Output” (I-O) economic model to calculate the number of jobs created for every $1 million in spending, using data from the U.S. Economic Census, Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics, and U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and other sources.

Among her findings, and according to the study, “domestic spending outpaces military spending in job creation by 21 percent (for wind energy development) to 178 percent (for elementary and secondary education).”

Garrett-Peltier adds:

“The U.S. has a bloated military budget, and one of the reasons it has historically remained outsized is that defense spending creates jobs, both in the military and in the industries that supply goods and services to the armed forces, […] But when we compare federal spending on defense to the alternatives, such as health care, education, clean energy or infrastructure, we find that all of these areas create more jobs than an equivalent amount of military spending.”

The study further shows how the Trump administration’s push to increase military spending by a $54 billion clip “would create fewer jobs than equivalent spending on health care, education, clean energy or infrastructure, […] and would offer less economic benefit to the nation.”

What would another $54 billion in U.S. military spending reap? Certainly not more domestic jobs. If history is any indication, the most likely scenario is more endless and renegade war.

READ MORE WAR NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire War Files

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21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.