Lawrence Korb: A million job losses through defense cuts "irrelevant"

Posted By McQ • [November 17, 2011]

Lawrence Korb, who obviously sees defense as the budget cutting device that can save other spending programs, opens his POLITICO piece with this:

Defense is not now — nor was it ever intended to be — a jobs program.

So when an Aerospace Industries Association study — supported, unfortunately, by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) — attempts to warn Congress and the American people that cutting projected defense spending by as much as $1 trillion over the next decade, which might happen if sequestration takes effect, could cost 1 million jobs, the appropriate response is that this is irrelevant.

Actually it’s not irrelevant in the least. Not when you have an administration trying to spend more money on “infrastructure jobs” and touting jobs it has “saved or created”. Not when you have a president who is claiming the national priority is jobs, jobs, jobs.

It isn’t irrelevant at all.

I agree with his essential point and made it myself yesterday. Defense isn’t a “jobs program”. And no one is arguing it is. That doesn’t make the impact of cuts to this particular sector less “relevant”. Again, a million jobs in the middle of a deep recession means more trouble not less. So Korb’s cavalier dismissal of that impact as irrelevant is, well, irrelevant. It’s a false premise.

This isn’t about the jobs, necessarily (although they are important), it is about the future of our national security. As the Air Force generals I quoted yesterday emphasized the decisions made today will have a profound effect in 20 to 30 years. If we cut major defense programs now, we suffer their consequences then. Sure, we’ll see a million jobs go down the drain now. But the short sightedness of huge cuts now really doesn’t have anything to do with jobs. It has to do with a degraded and less capable national defense in the future.

Korb attempts to use this false premise to sell a trillion dollars in cuts to defense programs and then promises vapor jobs in return:

That $1 trillion can be used to lower our federal debt, which Adm. Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the greatest threat to our national security.

Or it could be used to create at least 2 million new jobs — to replace the 600,000 that could be lost.

Note that Korb claims, with no basis for his claim (after supposedly taking apart the argument that a million jobs will be lost with sequestration cuts) and then blithely hand waves “at least” 2 million new jobs into existence by doing what?

Spending that trillion dollars. That’s worked so well for us in the past 3 years hasn’t it?

And his desire to “create at least 2 million new jobs” to replace those lost tells you what?

That those lost if the cuts to defense are made aren’t irrelevant at all – are they Mr. Korb?