Time to end the business of war

A conservative Arizona senior official was recently echoing the alarm being spread by Fox News and others that recently proposed cuts in military spending would cause all kinds of bad things. This official was particularly concerned about Arizona jobs tied to the military industrial complex (there are many). 

My problem is that these are the people who are up in arms about deficits and public debt, yet find it so easy to rationalize spending money we don't have when it fuels the war machine, but not when it helps people get access to healthcare, or education, or affordable food, etc...

I wrote back to this official today, below is the bulk of my message:

'These jobs are clearly important to Arizona, indeed several of my friends work for local companies who rely heavily on government contracts. And my employer’s single largest global customer is the DoD, so we will feel it too.

But the fact is, out-of-control military spending is a key driver of our budget deficits and national debt. Experts agree that we can clearly secure our borders and retain a massive force of dissuasion around the world with a much smaller budget. We spend more in this area than the next 10+ biggest spending countries combined, including China and Russia. This runaway spending is in fact a huge competitive disadvantage for the US, and does not buy us more security than we would have with 5-10% less spending.

I don’t wish for Arizona to lose any good paying jobs. But in these times of so much complaint about government handouts and welfare and borrowing, it’s time for these companies to develop growth strategies that aren’t so dependent on public funds. Balanced budgets and reduced deficits are key to our long term competitiveness. If we agree on that, we have to concede that military expenditures can’t exceed a certain proportion of government spending, and right now they are way out of proportion.

What can Arizona do to help these companies de-militarize their focus, and instead shift their engineering and manufacturing talent to building the energy and transportation and communication systems of the future, and do it with private capital investment, not taxpayer subsidies? I think that’s where their future lies, and if we can be the State to help them do it, it will help attract outside investment and create many more good paying jobs in Arizona. We have world-class scientists and researchers at ASU and UofA already working on these topics, attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in research investments and producing enormous economic value to Arizona, this is also something we should seek to accelerate and scale'.