Don't Cash Your Peace Dividend
BROCKWAY, GEORGE P.
The Dismal Science DONT CASH YOUR PEACE DIVIDEND BY GEORGE P. BROCKWAY The thing about the peace dividend is that there is not going to be one. At least not the kind you and I long for....
...Recalling the old Army again, I remember that six months after Hiroshima morale was so poor that the more guards they put around supply depots and motor pools, the more hands there were to steal the stuff...
...As Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen would have said, that's real money...
...The Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the most successful of the New Deal programs, could be resurrected...
...have nothing to do with our predicament...
...Bolles told how, at the end of World War II, some companies got more money for canceling contracts than they would have gotten for fulfilling them, how surplus truck spare parts were sold by the government for peanuts, andso on...
...Although we have the successes of the Marshall Plan to show us what to do, and the disasters of the banks' recycling of OPEC money (see "100 Million Children Can Be Wronged," NL, January 8) to show us what not to do, we also have an Administration that is at least the second most doctrinaire of our history...
...Tent cities could be quickly established for the homeless on vacant city lots...
...Today there's no danger of our doing anything like the Marshall Plan or the Brzezinski Plan...
...There are other things that might be done, especially by the Army engineers, who could work on playgrounds and airports and roads as well as on the dams and waterways they always handle...
...But that's nonsense...
...Besides, if the military air traffic controllers all went to work for the Federal Aviation Administration (or whoever runs civilian airports), who would keep the Air Force from flying its planes into each other...
...We could afford it...
...And 1.1 per cent of the astronomical sum would be $259 billion, or roughly $65 bilhon a year...
...We can't just toss them out on the street...
...Someofthemoney went to the Near East and Asia, too...
...It may be different with volunteer troops...
...When Margaret Sullavan asked Nugent if he liked the Army, hereplied, "Idon'tthinkyou're supposed to like it...
...The Marshall Plan worked because it required each of the receiving countries to develop detailed recovery plans that fitted in with neighbors' plans...
...it is not military...
...yet common sense cries out that somehow life ought to be better without a cold war than with one...
...With the various support troops, that could come to about 50,000 men and women—not enough to satisfy the most enthusiastic peaceniks, but astart, anyway...
...Last year's deficit was $152 billion, bringing the national debt to $2,866 billion, which is equal to about 55 per cent of the GNP...
...Today we have a similar opportunity to do some good in the world, and we're acting like J. Alfred Prufrock...
...While one claims that the Marshall Plan was perfect in all respects, no one doubts that it helped Western Europe recover from the War, and very few doubt that it was crucial to the recovery...
...Not even a crummy one...
...Most of this went to the countries of Western Europe, although the Soviet Union was invited to participate, and Czechoslovakia actually did join but was forced to pull out...
...Certainly this was a better world after World War II than during it or, for that matter, before it...
...Among the things Secretary of Defense Richard B. Cheney says we could perhaps do without are two Army divisions, or maybe three...
...In any case, we have a moral, if not a legal, obligation to these volunteers...
...And not only better for us, but for everyone around the globe...
...In fart, the New Deal had a lot of ideas that might be suitable, as we used to say, for retreading...
...Yes, we would be out of our minds—but not because we couldn't afford it...
...The issue, however, is economic...
...Again we find that the peace dividend is at best a swap (maybe a swap we ought to make), not something to put in the bank...
...But we weren't paralyzed...
...The trouble is, we do not have enough money in the budget for more air traffic controllers, and there is certainly no money to share with the cities and states that are too broke to hire as many cops as they need...
...The first thing he would do is send the Vice President to warn the potential recipients of our help against abortion and the capital gains tax...
...Gramm-RudmanHollings and President Bush's lips will forbid it...
...The complex' corporations, by contrast, if experience is a guide, won't suffer...
...What I'm afraid we are incapable of now is summoning up the necessary intelligence and the vision to tackle the job properly...
...Even if Fidel Castro shaved off his beard and became a fellow of the American Heritage Foundation, we would still need the military-industrial complex for quite a while longer...
...We can't afford to shelter our homeless or to teach our children to read and write or to provide comprehensive health care as good as, say, Italy's, orahundredotherthings...
...The problem with the industrial half of the military-industrial complex is a little different...
...I do know that they are all volunteers, and that we spent (and still spend) a lot of money on TV commercials during sports broadcasts persuading them that the Army is a real fun place...
...All that is, I think, understandable...
...It's different in the real world...
...The $13.2 billion the Marshall Plan cost us was 1.1 per cent of the GNP of those four years...
...On June 5,1947, when Secretary of State George C. Marshall gave his famous commencement address at Harvard, the national debt was equal to about 115 per cent of the GNP...
...I don't know what these young people signed when they enlisted...
...The bottom line (to preserve the metaphor) is that there's no likely peace dividend here, either...
...There's the Federal deficit, and the Federal debt, and now the states' deficits...
...The reason for this is quite simple: We live in a historical universe, a world where one thing leads to another, a world of time...
...Why then and not now...
...Everyone says we are in this mess because of the Federal debt...
...It is not much of an expansion, to be sure, for most people...
...We'dbeoutof ourminds to think so grandly, we are told...
...The workers can be fired, all right—certainly those on the factory floor—and they will wind up on the welfare rolls...
...Leonard Silk said it in the same issue of the New York Times that carried Brzezinski's Op-Ed article...
...Even if we could toss them out, and did, they would then become part of the civilian problem...
...The defense budget, though, has grown handsomely—it has almost doubled, and by doing so has kept the expansion alive...
...The plans were theirs, not ours...
...In the four years from 1948 through 1951, the Economic Cooperation Administration gave away $13.2 billion...
...If our famous expansion continues at its current rate, the GNP of the next four years will total approximately four and a half times that, or $23,549.4 billion...
...As I said at the start, I don't expect that there will be a peace dividend...
...We'd have to use the peace dividend we earned by firing them to feed, clothe, and shelter them until we somehow found a peaceful use for the skills they had learned jumping out of airplanes and firing assault rifles...
...The arguments of Irving Kristol and William F. Buckley Jr...
...For my part, I'm skeptical...
...He's no wimp...
...It could be helpful...
...Well, I dream...
...Not this year, and probably not next...
...Of course, the expansion would have been just as vibrant if we had spent those extra billions on public housing or better schools or controlling acid rain, but what's done is done...
...Of course, many of the young men and women in the services do have skills that are in demand...
...Well, it'sno secret...
...As youmay have heard tell, wearealleged tobeinthesixthor seventh year of one of the longest peacetime economic expansions in our history...
...They have to be fired...
...It's about 50— repeat fifty—times what we'll probably comeup with...
...If deactivating the divisions is going to contribute to the peace dividend and save us some money, the 50,000 have to be taken off the Federal payroll...
...At best, we might pick up some crumbs at home...
...General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then whistle-stopping through Pennsylvania during his first campaign, referred to the book glowingly (thus stimulating some welcome sales), until some spoilsport whispered to him that most of the rich men in question were Republicans...
...In 1989 the GNP was $5,233.2 billion...
...Let's look first at the military side of the military-industrial complex...
...Then, as now, we had a President and a Congress of opposing political parties, and we had a national debt that was, proportionately, more than twice what it is at present...
...The old Army, the one I was in, was more accurately described by Elliot Nugent in John Van Druten's The Voice of the Turtle...
...Can you imagine the man who sent the Army and the Air Force into Panama standing for such namby-pamby stuff...
...Military air traffic controllers, for example, and military police could fill a gap in the civilian world without breaking stride...
...We shrug when we read Zbigniew Brzezinski's plan for Eastern Europe because we know we' re too far gone even to debate it...
...What's possibly worse, we can cheer Lech Walesa's gruff courage in Poland until the rafters ring and can applaud Vaclav Havel's eloquence in Czechoslovakia with tears in our eyes, yet the only way we can think to help them is by reducing our aid to the Philippines or welshing on our obligation to repair the damage we did to Panama...
...and the mysterious Mr...
...We could afford it, and we could balance the budget at the same time, for that's what we did in 1948-51, back in the days of Harry S. Truman, the supposed spendthrift...
...Their reduced incomes will also mean some hardship for neighborhood supermarkets, the trusting banks that hold their mortgages and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation...
...If we lived ina world of equilibrium economics, where everything happens in an instant, we could have any kind of peace dividend we liked, just by hitting the right computer keys to switch the accounts around...
...Once upon a time I edited a book by the late Blair Bolles called How to Get Rich in Washington: The Rich Man's Division of the Welfare State...
...The Department of Defense is now eager to enter the war on drugs...
...What would 1.1 per cent of the GNP of the next four years be...
Vol. 73 • March 1990 • No. 5
