Repeated calls by the U.S. military service chiefs for additional
defense spending—to modernize aging equipment, to improve
troop retention and recruiting, to keep the forces ready for combat—obviously
caught on with the presidential candidates this fall, both of whom
pledged to increase the defense budget, if elected.
Inside the Beltway, policy makers and think tanks have been speculating
not on whether defense spending will go up, but by how much.
The reality outside the Beltway, however, is that most Americans
would prefer that the government take dollars out of defense to
fund education and job training programs, and medical research,
according to a recent study by the non-partisan Center on Policy
Attitudes, based in Washington, D.C.
The center polled 712 Americans using an Internet-based methodology
that it claims produces a representative sample because it is not
limited to households that have Internet access.
The discretionary federal budget was broken into 12 major categories:
space and science research, the environment, job training, defense,
humanitarian and economic aid to foreign countries, transportation,
the State Department, the United Nations and U.N. peacekeeping,
federal administration of justice and medical research.
The respondents were told that for those 12 areas, plus debt reduction,
the United States spends about $460 billion, which comes out to
about $1,000 for the average taxpayer. They were shown the distribution
of the discretionary spending for fiscal year 1999.
Then they were asked to re-apportion the money among those 12 areas,
according to what they believed should be changed.
The majority, 68 percent, cut defense by 24 percent. In today’s
dollars, that would be a $70 billion cut. They increased education
by 45 percent, job-training programs by 128 percent, and medical
research by 147 percent.
Surprisingly, the budget line that received the greatest boost
was the United Nations and U.N. peacekeeping, which was upped by
218 percent. During focus group discussions held by the Center on
Policy Attitudes (COPA), one participant said, “Peacekeeping,
military aid to foreign countries and humanitarian [aid], all those
saw some of the increase that I took from defense.” This statement
reflected what COPA believes was the inclination by many of the
survey participants to shift money from the defense budget to other
non-military forms of handling international problems.
Steven Kull, the director of COPA, explained that these findings
by no means should be interpreted as a sign that Americans don’t
want a strong military. As a matter of fact, he said, 78 percent
of Americans (based on a recent Gallup poll) want defense spending
to at least remain unchanged or go up.
Only when respondents were shown the percentage of the federal
discretionary budget that goes to defense (59 percent) were they
inclined to re-distribute the wealth. Discretionary spending does
not include off-budget programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
“In the focus groups that we conducted, people expressed great
surprise at the amount devoted to defense,” said Kull. “When
they see the distribution of the discretionary federal budget, they
say ‘this looks like a world’s policeman budget.’”
The reason most people wanted to increase U.N. peacekeeping, Kull
explained, was because they believed U.S. participation in world
affairs should be multilateral. Americans are not “isolationist,”
he said. But they generally do not support the United States becoming
the “world’s policeman.”
Two-Conflict Principle
Americans also appear to reject some of the principles that currently
shape the size of the defense budget, such as the “two major
theater conflict” standard followed by the Pentagon. That
parameter was set in 1993, and says that the United States should
have the ability to fight two regional wars at once without the
help of allies.
Nearly three-quarters of the survey respondents, said Kull, believe
that the United States should spend enough to protect itself, but,
when involved in wars overseas, it should work with allies or through
the United Nations.
Kull insisted that this poll does not imply that Americans do not
support the military services. The problem is that most U.S. citizens
are not familiar with how the government allocates federal dollars.
When people are asked in general about budgetary issues, often it
becomes a “wish list,” he said, meaning that most people
would like to add money for programs they personally support. It’s
only when they are presented with tradeoff dilemmas that “meaningful”
responses result. In this poll, the tradeoffs that they made were
to cut defense in favor of education, job training and medical research.
The existence of a wide gap between government decisions and public
opinion can be attributed to the influence of special interests,
Kull noted. The policies made in Washington and the public’s
opinion only match about 50 percent of the time, he said. Asked
whether the COPA study would have any influence on policy makers,
Kull replied, “I don’t think the public is terribly
influential on any issue.”
Several years ago, COPA conducted an opinion poll on Americans’
views regarding foreign aid. Most people thought the United States
spent 20 percent of the federal budget on foreign aid, while in
fact foreign aid was only 1 percent of the budget. COPA blamed that
misperception on frequent references by politicians to foreign aid
as an enormous burden. The center cited, as a classic example, remarks
made by North Carolina’s Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, who
said, in 1994, that “the foreign aid program has spent an
estimated $2 trillion of the taxpayers money.” That number
was over-exaggerated, said COPA, and such statements partially explain
why the misconstrual lingers about foreign aid.
The findings of the COPA study notwithstanding, it appears that,
to a certain extent, political leaders on Capitol Hill do pay attention
to public opinion. During a breakfast with defense industry executives
last month, a senior House staffer expressed disappointment about
the difficulties in getting pieces of defense-related legislation
approved by Congress in time before the elections. It’s been
a “gun-versus-butter” debate on the Hill, said the staffer,
who was speaking on condition of anonymity. “The assumption
is that every nickel we spend on guns is a nickel not spent on butter.”
But the underlying problem, he said, is not that politicians on
the Hill can’t come to an agreement. The problem is that the
debate over defense priorities is “hard to catch fire with
the American people.”