Percentage of federal discretionary spending in 2001 devoted to “homeland security” or the Department of Defense: 51

The Heritage Foundation has assembled a mighty mountain of data on Federal Revenue and Spending in their indispensable “Book of Charts”.  Although I’m sure that Harper’s would like to give the impression that the U.S. government is hell-bent for war and domestic spying (Ashcroft!), two graphs from the Heritage research are enough to clarify the issue.

First, note the words “discretionary spending”.  If a larger portion of this spending is taken up by defense, it’s because so much of the total U.S. budget is now going towards mandatory spending.  As this graph shows, thanks mostly to the aging baby boomers, Medicare and Social Security are eating up an ever-increasing portion of the federal pie, with mandatory spending rising eleven times faster than discretionary spending.  In constant dollars, discretionary spending has risen 62% since 1962, while mandatory spending has increased 687% - a trend that is likely to accelerate as boomers hit 60 in 2005.  As discretionary spending gets squeezed, the U.S. government will start to function strictly as a equity transfer entity: taxing workers and moving the money to retirees (Social Security) and banks (interest on the national debt).

That said, how does the 51% defense spending match up to historical trends?  As this Heritage graph shows, non-defense discretionary spending has increased 188% since 1962 while discretionary spending on defense has barely changed (inflation-adjusted dollars).  In fact, except for the five years after the end of the Vietnam War, defense spending has always outpaced non-defense spending, sometimes dramatically so.  One might go so far to wonder why, in this age of terrorism, defense spending isn’t much higher?  So much for the hegemony of the military-industrial complex.