The Sequestration Sideshow

BFAD’s Gordon Adams has a few insights to share on the sideshow occurring with the sequester debate, addressing some of the claims made by defense industry advocates with greater granularity. With the possibility of over $50 billion in defense cuts going into effect this coming January, the defense industry has launched an all-out campaign against sequestration that would raise nearly any eyebrow. Our own Gordon Adams provides some context for some of the claims of that campaign:

• “A million jobs are not at stake. Two-thirds of those cited are ‘induced jobs,’ not defense jobs. This broader employment is affected by everything (and typically counted many times over, depending on what direct spending is being focused on)…[and] when the broader economy grows, so do those jobs. They are not tied to defense.”

• “The main event is the defense build-down, not the sequester. The typical build-down — Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War — lowers defense budgets 30 percent in constant dollars over 10 years. If we took a trillion dollars out of the defense plan DOD projected last year, it would, at 17 percent, be the most shallow build-down we have experienced since World War II.”

As Gordon noted, when the sideshow is viewed more closely, it may not be worth all the attention it’s getting.