The Bipartisan Consensus Nobody Wants to Talk About
The United States military budget stands at $886 billion. That figure, passed with the votes of 55 percent of House Democrats, forms the backdrop of a Labor Politics article that asks a question almost nobody in mainstream politics dares to raise: what if the country simply spent less on war?
But we should be honest: this didn't start with Trump. For decades, both parties have shared the same basic commitment to U.S. military dominance over the world.
The article wastes no time establishing that this is not a partisan critique. The author points to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, whose objections to military escalation center on process and "strategic clarity" rather than any fundamental challenge to American supremacy. Kamala Harris promised voters the "strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world." The bipartisan agreement on militarism is, the piece argues, so deep that even opposition to a specific war misses the structural point.
As long as the United States spends almost $1 trillion a year on the military, there will be overwhelming institutional and political pressure to use that machine, justify that machine, and keep expanding that machine — while insisting that there's no money at home to make life affordable for working people.
This is the article's central thesis, and it lands hard. The argument is not merely that military spending is excessive, but that the existence of a trillion-dollar war apparatus creates its own gravitational pull toward conflict. The machine demands to be used.
The Proposal: Cut It in Half
The headline proposal is bold and specific: reduce the $886 billion military budget to roughly $443 billion.
A military budget of "only" about $443 billion would still leave the United States the biggest military spender in the world.
That framing does real work. The United States spends more on its armed forces than the next nine countries combined. Even after a 50 percent cut, no nation on earth would outspend the Pentagon. The article uses this fact to preempt the inevitable accusation that halving military spending means leaving the country defenseless. It does not.
Still, a 50 percent cut in a single stroke would be historically unprecedented in peacetime. The article cites the post-World War II drawdown, when military spending fell 89 percent from wartime peaks by 1948. But that comparison obscures a crucial difference: the country was demobilizing from total war, with broad public consensus that the emergency was over. No such consensus exists today. The U.S.-China rivalry, the war in Ukraine, and ongoing commitments across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East all create political headwinds that the article acknowledges only glancingly.
The Shopping List
The most striking section of the piece is a seventeen-item catalog of what $443 billion per year could buy instead. The list ranges from Medicare for All to a national high-speed rail network to canceling all medical and student debt.
We are constantly told that universal childcare is too expensive, housing is too expensive, healthcare is too expensive, public transit is too expensive, climate adaptation is too expensive. One simple solution is to cut the military budget in half.
The rhetorical strategy here is effective. By stacking program after program, each with sourced cost estimates, the article forces readers to confront a basic arithmetic: the money exists, it is simply allocated toward destruction rather than care. Universal childcare runs $70 to $100 billion per year. A federal jobs guarantee costs $300 to $500 billion. Canceling all medical debt in collections would take $195 billion, less than a quarter of the freed funds.
The staggering thing about this list is that even the most expensive items rarely exceed $443 billion individually. You could fund several of them simultaneously with half the military budget.
The cumulative effect of the list is powerful, though a skeptic would note that several of these programs carry ongoing annual costs that, if combined, would quickly exceed $443 billion. The article presents them as alternatives, but political reality suggests that once spending is redirected, competing domestic priorities would consume the savings faster than any single line item suggests.
The Hardest Part: Transition
The article does not shy away from the political difficulty. Military spending sustains communities across the country, and the institution itself remains remarkably popular with the public.
Even though more Americans want to cut the military budget than expand it — and even though this war on Iran is widely opposed — the military itself as an institution remains remarkably popular.
The proposed solution borrows from the post-1945 playbook: deep Pentagon cuts paired with job guarantees, wage protections, retraining, and union-led transition planning. The article envisions converting weapons factories to civilian production, much as wartime plants once shifted from tanks to automobiles.
This is where the argument is thinnest. The post-war conversion happened in an economy roaring with pent-up consumer demand after years of rationing. Today's defense-dependent communities face a different landscape. The article gestures at transition planning but does not grapple with the decades it would take to retool supply chains, retrain specialized workforces, or replace the economic base of towns built around military installations. Acknowledging the difficulty is not the same as solving it.
Incrementalism and the Bigger Vision
To the author's credit, the piece concedes that the goal of halving the budget would likely be reached through incremental steps rather than a single dramatic cut.
Along the way to our goal of halving the budget, we should also support intermediary military budget cuts like the 10 percent proposed by Bernie Sanders. Realistically, it will probably be through the accretion of such partial steps forward that we'll achieve our goals.
But the article insists that modest cuts alone are insufficient, not just because they free up less money, but because they fail to spark the deeper national debate the author wants: a reckoning with the premise that the United States has the right to project military force anywhere on earth at any time.
It's also important that we spark a serious national debate about how the United States can begin relating to the world in a way that does not hinge on domination and exploitation.
The closing invocation of Martin Luther King Jr., who called the United States the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world" in 1967, places the argument in a long tradition of American dissent. Whether that tradition can move from the margins to the mainstream of electoral politics remains the open question the article leaves unanswered.
Bottom Line
The piece makes its strongest case through simple arithmetic: the United States spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined, and even a 50 percent cut would leave it the world's largest military spender. The domestic spending alternatives are real, sourced, and individually affordable. Where the argument falters is in the transition mechanics and the geopolitical vacuum that rapid drawdown would create. But the core provocation stands. When both parties agree that nearly a trillion dollars for war is untouchable while childcare and healthcare remain "too expensive," the problem is not budgetary. It is political.