This article examines the often studied guns vs. butter tradeoff within the context of federal military spending and means-tested social welfare spending in an effort to focus academic attention on the impact of military expenditure on America’s poorest populations. Using OLS regression on federal budgetary data ranging from 1962 to 2020, I test for a tradeoff between military spending as a proportion of the discretionary budget and means-tested welfare spending as a proportion of the mandatory budget. I also include several covariates that previous literature has shown to be relevant to a potential tradeoff — including war status, poverty rate, unemployment rate, economic growth, inequality, and legislator ideology — to determine whether they play a mediating role between military and means-tested welfare spending. I also conduct a qualitative analysis of platforms published by the Democratic and Republican parties during select election years between 1940 and 2020 in order to find a causal mechanism for a budgetary tradeoff. These analyses conclude that there is significant statistical evidence of a tradeoff between these two spending categories, and that party attitudes about who/what is more deserving of federal funding — which are consistently expressed by each party throughout the 80-year period — provide a causal mechanism for such a tradeoff. These attitudes, which are constructed through the priorities expressed in platforms over time, cause legislators to provide funding to groups (either the military or the American poor) that they find deserving, and subtract funding from those they find undeserving. In finding that military expenditure directly undermines life-saving assistance, this article encourages greater study of how seemingly unrelated budgetary decisions (especially those relating to national defense) may play an active role in America’s worsening inequality crisis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45180 |
| Date | 25 September 2022 |
| Creators | Dominguez-Lash, Esteban |
| Contributors | Crawford, Neta |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
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