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John,
Twenty years have now passed since 9/11.
The 20 years since those terrible attacks have been marked by endless wars, harsh immigration crackdowns, and expanded federal law enforcement powers that have cost us our privacy and targeted entire communities based on nothing more than race, religion, or ethnicity.
The human costs have been catastrophic, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost to wars and violence, and countless more torn apart by displacement and deportations. These policies have also come at a tremendous monetary cost — and a dangerous neglect of domestic investment.
In a new report we authored at the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, we found that the federal government has spent $21 trillion on war and militarization both inside the U.S. and around the world over the past 20 years. That’s roughly the size of the entire U.S. economy.
Even while politicians have written blank checks for militarism year after year, they’ve said we can’t afford to address our most urgent issues. No wonder these past 20 years have been rough on U.S. families and communities.
In the past year alone, the COVID-19 pandemic, the January 6 Capitol insurrection, wildfires raging in the West, and the fall of Afghanistan have shown us that militarized investments cannot buy us safety. The next 20 years present an opportunity to reconsider where we need to reinvest for a better future.
For far less than it spent on militarization since 9/11, the U.S. could reinvest to meet critical challenges that have been neglected for the last 20 years:
- $4.5 trillion could fully decarbonize the U.S. electric grid.
- $2.3 trillion could create 5 million jobs at $15 per hour with benefits and cost-of-living adjustments for 10 years.
- $1.7 trillion could erase student debt.
- $200 billion could guarantee free preschool for every 3-and-4-year old for 10 years, and raise teacher pay.
- $25 billion could provide COVID vaccines for the whole populations of low-income countries.
We could do all that and more for less than half of what we’ve spent on wars and militarization in the last 20 years. With communities across the country in dire need of investment, the case for avoiding more pointless, deadly wars couldn’t be clearer.
These findings have been featured in outlets like In These Times, Newsweek, CBS, Fortune, Jacobin, The Real News, and Mother Jones, among others, as well as radio programs around the country like Between the Lines and 8 O'Clock Buzz, and NPP’s Lindsay Koshgarian has written about them in a syndicated op-ed for OtherWords.
Rep. Barbara Lee also cited our research in an article in The Guardian, and joined IPS for a powerful conversation reflecting on 20 years of post-9/11 militarization, which also features Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, IPS executive director Tope Folarin, and leaders from Win Without War and the Friends Committee on National Legislation — you can watch it here.
Together with our social movement allies, we’ll be keeping up the fight to shift our national priorities away from the devastating militarism of the last 20 years and toward the investments in people and our planet that we desperately need.
The best time for those investments would have been during the past 20 years. The next best time is now.
You can help by reading the #StateOfInsecurity report, sharing it with friends, movement partners, and lawmakers, and sharing the findings on social media on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Thanks for all you do!
In solidarity,
Lindsay, Ashik, Lorah, and the NPP team at IPS
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