The New York Times, that bastion of liberal media bias, is up with one of the most shockingly ridiculous headlines of all time: “Military Budget Cuts May Harm Innovation”. Under the headline, the actual title of the piece is only slightly less one-sided: “A Shrinking Budget May Take Neighbors With It”. The rationale for the article is simple, tired, and artificial; it is a cousin to the rationale that permeates our national discussion on energy. Simply put; fossil fuels and military spending are job-creators, any alternatives to the above are job-killers.
The article compounds its mendacity by accepting as gospel the notion that cuts in traditional spending must be made, ignoring any changes to revenue, and all fixes to the true drivers of budget deficit. Workers without jobs don’t have income to pay taxes on, and health care costs that are well beyond what all other industrialized nations pay drive budget nightmares at the federal, state, local, and corporate levels. None of that, of course, matters if you are an author whose primary goal is to provide specious arguments supporting the corporate military/fossil fuels complex. A bill spending $400 billion on domestic construction projects and $400 billion on tax credits aimed at the working class was a waste, they claim, but cutting $45 billion per year over ten years will cripple innovation and kill jobs. Those very same arguing that the native home of innovation is the marketplace, are now arguing that innovation will be crippled without government spending of a certain type.