The above video is not a Werther’s Originals commercial, nor is this grandfatherly-looking man about to trick you into listening to his stories about the good old days with the lure of caramel candies. He’s Chalmers Johnson–former professor of political science at UC Berkeley and all-around intellectual bad-ass–and he’s dropping major science on the subject of American defense spending. This video is a great primer on the driving force behind our nation’s current debt crisis. But a more thorough explanation can be found in Johnson’s latest article, which I will now attempt to organize into an easily digestible summary, along with a few of my own thoughts.

In the years immediately following WWII, the US government decided to enact a permanent wartime economy, believing it would stave off another depression and counter the the growing military might of the Soviet Union. As it turns out, however, both of these reasons were faulty. For starters, the Soviet threat is now known to have been greatly overstated. And secondly, the devotion to militarism has created huge opportunity costs–from our failure to invest in the social infrastructure (ie public schools and health care) to the loss of our manufacturing base for civilian needs.

As a result, going into 2008, the United States finds itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment. Its government no longer even attempts to reduce the ruinous expenses of maintaining huge standing armies, replacing the equipment that seven years of wars have destroyed or worn out, or preparing for a war in outer space against unknown adversaries. Instead, the Bush administration puts off these costs for future generations to pay — or repudiate. This utter fiscal irresponsibility has been disguised through many manipulative financial schemes (such as causing poorer countries to lend us unprecedented sums of money), but the time of reckoning is fast approaching.

Spending for the US military establishment during the current fiscal year (2008) is conservatively calculated to be at least $1.1 trillion. This is larger than all other military budgets of the world combined. The supplementary budget, which pays for the two ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is only a small portion of all military spending, is still greater than the next two highest defense spending countries combined, Russia and China. Even by not including the cost of these wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid 1990’s. More to the point, however, is this figure:

World total military expenditures: $1,100 billion
World total (minus the United States): $500 billion

As Johnson notes, “such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable.” Just look at our country’s “current account”–a statistic that measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. The US is currently “in the red” some $811.5 billion dollars. That is by far the worst out of 163 ranked countries. The country with the second worst deficit is Spain at only $106.4 billion. China, meanwhile, is ranked first in surplus gains.

In order to spend more than we can afford, our government has turned to borrowing.

On November 7, 2007, the U.S. Treasury announced that the national debt had breached $9 trillion for the first time ever. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the so-called debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the Constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defense expenditures in comparison with the rest of the world.

Although the situation looks pretty grim, Johnson believes there are steps we can take to alleviate the damage.

These include reversing Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget all projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States, and ceasing to use the defense budget as a jobs program.

How we get politicians to follow this agenda is another story. It goes well beyond voting for “change.” This current presidency has set new standards for executive power and military spending–the likes of which have not been seen before. Therefore, we cannot expect the next administration to ignore the temptation of continuing down this ruinous, but politically-tempting path. We must act as taxpayers–not just voters–and refuse contributing to this morally deprived and pragmatically bankrupt wartime economy.

If you’d like to read more about War Tax resistance, check out this article I wrote last year (with the help of defense spending analyst Eric Stoner).