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Apparently Trump is seeking a 10% cut in non-defense spending and a $500 billion increase in defense spending.
These numbers are so high that I feel like this is probably some kind of bluster or a gambit to get a smaller increase by asking for a larger one.
This would raise US defense spending as a fraction of GDP to the same level as the height of the War on Terror, except with no 9/11 to motivate political will to support the increase.
A 10% cut in non-defense spending would hurt many people, including many Trump supporters, especially given that the DOGE experiment was cancelled and so one cannot expect much efficiency increase to offset the cuts.
A $500 billion defense increase makes no sense except if the US is increasing preparations to engage in a war with China. No other potential adversary even comes close to justifying such an increase. But China is not currently threatening any vital US interests other than Taiwan, and defense of Taiwan could be increased to effective levels without $500 extra billion. It is, after all, an island with rugged terrain, 24 million people, and its own military.
If a war does happen, it carries enormous risks one way or another, even with the extra budget. If a war does not happen, it is money largely wasted in that it could be spent better instead.
It would also be a huge experiment to add on top of the already ongoing tariff project, with difficult-to-predict consequences to the economy. The consequences might be hard to predict, but I feel like it's safe to say that the money could be spent in more productive ways.
The political fallout of actually getting these changes implemented, which seems like an extreme long shot, would drive everyone other than hardcore MAGA "I love the troops" types away and people who directly benefit from defense spending away from the Republican coalition and would give non-Republicans a huge amount of fodder for campaign material.
Even the fallout of just trying to get the changes implemented is bad. It is coming not long before the midterms and it is also a ready-made gift to Newsom or whoever else runs in 2028.
What is Trump doing with this?
How would it be wasted when the alternative is social programs which may have a lower ROI? This presupposes that defunded social programs have an unusually high ROI, which I don't think it's possible to conclude this.
As Eisenhower remarked,
Neither military toys nor social programs have an easily determined ROI.
Consider the Manhattan project. For the purpose of winning WW2 at a total cost of 2G$ (e.g. on the order of a percent of the total war budget), it failed to help with defeating the Nazis and arguably was not needed to get Japan to surrender without an invasion.
On the other hand, it also helped to establish the US as a prime superpower and likely prevented a hot war with the USSR. And in the counterfactual world where the Nazis had worked on nukes in earnest, it would have prevented them gaining a monopoly on them. So it is hard to put the ROI in monetary terms.
For evaluating social programs, there are two approaches. One is to look at them from an utilitarian/EA perspective, but this requires terminal values like preferring people not to die of starvation. The other is to look at them from the perspective of buying social peace: one good reason to feed the poor is that they are not likely to peacefully watch their kids die of starvation when you do not have food programs. Instead, most of them would turn to crime to feed their kids. In a country where food is cheap and labor is rather expensive, it is probably cost-effective to just feed the poor rather than hiring enough police (and lawyers and prison guards) to neutralize any food riots. Relatedly, the other disruptive thing the poor can do even before they turn to crime is vote. Capitalism can create immense amounts of wealth, but this is unlikely to persuade poor people who feel that they do not profit from it personally. So social programs can be also seen as a bribe, where society gives the poor a cut of the spoils so they don't rock the boat. Still, I will concede that it is just as hard to quantify these benefits as it is with military spending.
Not strictly germane to the conversation, but a fun tidbit is that the Manhattan project wasn't close to the most expensive weapons program USG ran in WWII - that was the B29, whose development at $3T cost 50% more than the Bomb.
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