It’s time to set straight a myth that has persisted for many decades, perpetuated most recently by Arianna Huffington in her post, “Guns vs. Butter 2010.” The myth is that, as she put it quoting Eisenhower, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.” The fact is that the idea that a dollar spent on defense is a dollar not spent on helping Americans is entirely false. Leave aside the debate over the wisdom of American involvement in the world or the desirability of winning ongoing conflicts rather than losing them. The simple fact is that the overwhelming proportion of every dollar spent on defense goes straight back into the American economy.
Defense spending has long been recognized as one of the single strongest stimulants to any economy. World War II brought America out of the Great Depression and into an era of enormous prosperity, just to cite the most obvious example. Current defense spending will not have that effect because it is so small compared to the size of the economy—it hovers at or below 4 percent of GDP.
