Defense Spending is Spending

Brad DeLong has a post on the long-term fiscal outlook for the country where he violates an important unwritten rule of conventional wisdom-dom — he treats defense spending as actual spending involved in tradeoffs with taxes and other forms of spending. Normally, the exact same “deficit hawks” who freak out at every single cent of domestic outlay think nothing of tossing another $8 billion a month at Iraq or eagerly embracing the latest weapon system. Brad’s specific proposal is decidedly un-radical:

[S]top sending our soldiers–the best-trained and best-equipped high tech armed forces in the world–abroad to be military police in countries riven by sectarian conflict where they do not speak the language–and so return defense spending to its late-1990s share of GDP.

I think I’d probably go a bit further than that in terms of paring back. But either way, I think it’s vitally important as a first step to just put defense spending “on the table” — to recall that the fiscal cost of our defense posture is a real cost.