World War II...

...(and the spending it required) is often credited with lifting the United States out of the Great Depression. After the war ended, many experts feared the economy would suffer. (Montgomery Ward, to take one famous example, refused to expand into the burgeoning suburbs while its main competitor, Sears Roebuck, did. It was a fateful decision, but that's the subject of another post.)

After World War II came Korea, of course, followed by the Cold War, Vietnam, and, well, you know the rest. And it makes me wonder, sometimes, if the U. S. ever really converted back to a peacetime economy. Are we dependent, like a drug addict, on military spending to keep our economy going? After all, the U. S. spends more on defense than all other countries in the world, combined. What would happen if we stopped, or even slowed down?

Some in the tea party movement want to explore this possibility and take a closer look at the Defense Department's budget. But can it realistically be cut?

According to a story in today's Times, Secretary Robert Gates (my emphasis):

...plans to cut military spending by $78 billion over five years, the first serious proposed reductions in the budget since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and a response to White House pressure to squeeze spending during what Mr. Gates called a time of “extreme fiscal duress.” But the Pentagon’s operating budget for 2012 is expected to be about $553 billion, which would still reflect real growth.

(That's a cut of less than 3%, by my reckoning. The technical term for that is: rounding error.)

But Representative Howard McKeon, Republican from California who leads the House Armed Services Committee:

...fought back against proposed cuts in the Pentagon budget even as fledgling committee members supported by the Tea Party said that the nation’s debts amounted to a national security risk.

“I cannot say it strongly enough: I will not support any measures that stress our forces and jeopardize the lives of our men and women in uniform,” Mr. McKeon said in an opening statement that followed up on a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates urging him not to stop work on the Marines’ $14.4. billion Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, a combined landing craft and tank for amphibious assaults that Mr. Gates canceled this month.

"Jeopardize the lives of our men and women in uniform." Who could argue with that? But then the article goes on to say:

Mr. McKeon represents a California district that is home to major defense contractors [and] was the single biggest recipient in the House of campaign contributions from military aerospace companies and their employees.

Oh.

In public remarks at the hearing on Wednesday, [several tea party-backed members of the Committee] spoke up in favor of favorite military programs or of protecting military installations at home, illustrating the difficulty of balancing their overarching philosophy and goals with the immediate concerns of their districts.

Representative Vicky Hartzler, a freshman Republican from Missouri who was backed by former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, said ... “I will be a staunch defender of military installations in my district ...”

And finally,

Representative Scott Rigell, a Republican newcomer from Virginia [who] represents a district that is economically dependent on its military installations, spoke against plans to move one of five nuclear aircraft carriers based in Norfolk to Florida, taking with it 10,000 jobs.

So my question is, how dependent is the economy on military spending? Given the realities, can we really cut the DoD's budget in any meaningful way? And is this just representative of the federal budget as a whole? In other words, does every spending project have a constituency? Can any of it really be cut, or are we just kidding ourselves?