Mother’s Day and the Pentagon Budget Guest Blog by Rep. Mimi Stewart

Guest blog By Representative Mimi Stewart. Mimi Stewart is a State Representative from district 21 and State Director for the Women Legislators Lobby, a program of Women's Action for New Directions.

This Mother’s Day, I am thinking about mothers and families all over our country. The past few years have not been easy. Families struggled to make ends meet and here in New Mexico we had to find ways to continue to provide vital services even as revenues tumbled. In Washington, DC Congress is trying to put together a budget for next year. I’m watching this process closely because our state counts on funding from the federal government to implement crucial programs. The budget process will affect each and every one of my constituents.

The budget passed by House Republicans will slash programs used disproportionately by women and families. In addition to the Medicare and Medicaid cuts you may have heard about, it cuts funding for programs like food stamps, child care, Head Start, job training, Pell Grants, and housing and energy assistance. Meanwhile their budget allows defense spending to continue to increase.

So while we’ve cut spending for domestic programs that support families, communities and businesses, Pentagon spending continues to grow. Each year, Congress appropriates more than half of discretionary spending to the Department of Defense, wars and nuclear weapons spending. Even without deficit reduction pressure, this overspending takes dollars away from needed domestic priorities that strengthen our economy and ensure that America can compete in the world marketplace. As chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dempsey put it, “It makes no sense at all for us as a nation to have an extraordinarily capable military instrument of power if we are economically disadvantaged around the world.”

Also, many tax dollars going into this enormous Pentagon budget are wasted on outdated security strategy. Over the next decade, we are slated to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a nuclear weapons arsenal built for the Cold War era. These weapons are simply irrelevant to support our troops on the battlefield or to address 21st century threats.

In the past decade we have spent billions on war. Afghanistan is now the longest war in our nation’s history, and we spent nine years in Iraq. Now some seemed prepared to go to war in Iran. Whether measured merely in direct financial cost, or in the broader and more profound cost of lives lost and damaged, we cannot afford to be a nation perpetually at war.

Finally one thing upon which I hope we can all agree is that the Pentagon, which swallows up such a large percentage of our budget, must be at least as carefully scrutinized for waste as other government programs. Right now the Pentagon cannot even pass an audit to show how it spends our tax dollars.

Some supporters of the Pentagon and their contractors tout money to the Pentagon as a jobs program. Sensible national security jobs make sense, and no member of Congress can ignore the effect of policy decisions on jobs. Nonetheless, economists have shown that federal investments in non-military sectors--like education, healthcare and clean energy--create more jobs than military spending. It makes sense to invest federal dollars in sectors that will create productive jobs that will help our economy grow for years to come.

We can make sensible reductions to Pentagon spending and invest in programs that will help build a vibrant economy for generations to come. This Mother’s Day, let’s honor hard-working women around the nation by calling on Congress to pass a budget that supports women and families and puts us back on the path to a sustainable economic recovery.