From p. 25:
"Currently US military expenditures are eating up over 4 percent of the country's gross domestic product, compared to less than 2 percent of Europe's GDP spent on its military. That works out to well over 20 percent of the US federal government budget, more than either Social Security outlays or the cost of Medicare and Medicaid combined (and that does not include the huge expenditures on the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Veterans Administration, or the parts of NASA and the Department of Energy that are engaged in military-related activities). To put that into perspective, creating a European-like system of universal health care that includes the 47 million uninsured Americans would cost an additional $100 to $150 billion annually, only a fraction of one year's expenditures on the Iraq war. Creating European-like universal child care would cost $35 billion annually; the entire annual budget for the United Nations is only $16 billion. The amount spent by the US government on research and development for alternative energy in 2006 was only $4 billion, while the amount spent on R&D for new weapons was $76 billion. [emphasis added]
"US militarism has long been a core part of the American Way, doing triple duty as a formidable foreign policy tool, a powerful stimulus to the economy, and a usurper of tax dollars that could be spent on other budget priorities. 'Our problems are those of a very rich country which has been accustomed over the years to defense budgets that are actually jobs programs and also a major source of pork for the use of politicians in their reelection campaigns,' says Professor Chalmers Johnson, a prominent military critic. [emphasis added] Fifty years after Republican Dwight Eisenhower warned against an insatiable military-industrial complex, the American system is still bedeviled by a classic guns vs butter dilemma that the vastly less militarized European system has managed to avoid. The gargantuan difference in military spending is one of the greatest gaps between the American Way and the European Way, in some ways the elephant in the living room that overshadows most other aspects of the transatlantic relationship.
"... The European Union's way of foreign policy, meanwhile, uses carrots instead of a big stick; it succeeds not because of coercion but because it is so attractive to other countries who wish to join the EU or trade with it and receive investment and foreign aid (Europe has become the world's largest bilateral aid donor, providing more than twice as much aid to poor countries as the United States). [emphasis added] The EU's velvet diplomacy also costs a lot less money, allowing those resources to be steered instead into social spending and workfare supports that better support families and individuals."
Obama is trying to allocate more funds to green energy development, high speed rail and infrastructure improvement. However, he's still stuck with the massive expense of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It is to be hoped that he will wind down the Afghanistan war much as the Iraq war is winding down in such a way as to free up funding for peaceful development which would provide jobs both in the US and abroad. The Republican jobs program, should they come back into power, would simply be a ramping up of even more military spending thus providing jobs for low end grunts and high end engineers and programmers at the likes of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. This kind of socialism the Republicans have no problem with. It's only government spending for peaceful purposes that they resist and resent.
It's really quite simple. If you want more militarism and jobs in the military-industrial complex, elect Republicans. If you want a more benign foreign policy, a winding down of the military-industrial complex and jobs created for infrastructure development and increased foreign aid, vote Democratic. Jobs can be created in AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps as opposed to the Army, Navy and Marines. Instead of weapons system development, funding can be transferred to green energy development, a high tech electrical grid and high speed rail. That's the difference between Europe and the US - an emphasis on peaceful development vs an emphasis on militarism. The US with its wars of aggression around the world and its base occupation of numerous countries, its killing of civilians in foreign occupied countries, is only reaping the enmity of those we are trying to pacify, thereby increasing the terrorism threat against the homeland, Europe, as well as China and the BRIC countries, is pursuing a different route, husbanding their resources, building credit as opposed to debt economies and putting their countries on solid foundations building bridges of friendship with other countries instead of supporting corrupt dictators.
