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While the nearly $800 billion stimulus package signed by President Obama has come under intense fire from some conservatives, there has been hardly any comment on the Pentagon’s 2010 budget of $700 billion. Unemployment rates are sky high, record numbers of people are claiming jobless benefits, healthcare costs are bankrupting Americans, and millions are fore-closed out of their homes. Still, the Defense Department’s budget is in line with past fiscal year budgets under President Bush. While World War II spending is credited with lifting the US out of the Great Depression, arms expert Frida Berrigan says “military spending is no longer a stimulus driver.” In her new article in the Nation Magazine, Berrigan claims that unlike the economic revival of the 1940s, this time “we began with boom years and spent our way into the breach, in significant part by launching unnecessary, profligate wars.” She goes on to explain that the bloated Defense budget “mainly stimulates corporate shareholders, stock prices and (of course) war itself.”

GUEST: Frida Berrigan Senior Program Associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, former Deputy Director and Senior Research Associate at the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York City, columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus and a contributing editor of In These Times magazine

Read Berrigan’s article at: http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2009/next_defense_budget_stimulus_package_11761