The Guns-Versus-Butter Debate Lingers On.

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Date: 01 November 2000
• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

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...