STOPPING POWER : Who Said Quitters Never Win? Just Look at the Defense Industry.
How about this for a safety net? The business you’re in goes down the toilet, you’re out of a job, but you don’t have to settle for unemployment benefits amounting to a fraction of your former salary. Instead, you can just continue pulling in your regular money. Would you like to sign up? Then get into what the shrinks say is man’s oldest profession: manufacturing defense mechanisms. Become a defense industry.
On the one hand, President for Domestic Affairs John Sununu opposes the extension of unemployment benefits for ordinary people who’ve “exhausted their eligibility.” (Their eligibility got tired. How are they supposed to be feeling?) On the other hand, President for World Affairs George Bush warns us that his unilateral cutback of short-range nukes won’t save the country any money this year. In fact, he says, cutting back on defense may well cost us more.
That sounds like a swell little arrangement. Personally, I’d like to get me eight bars of that tune. I could stop writing this column, an arduous task for both man and machine, and just bill The Times for the usual amount. Or just a bit more. Maybe there’s a job that’s been pestering you with its incessant demands on your time, or ability, or talent at flattering supervisors. You should be able, under the Bush standard, to toss that burden over the side and still put in for a nice little raise.
An explanation followed from the President’s Sunday-morning defense defenders (“NBC, you get Scowcroft. No, I’m sorry. Cheney’s doing ‘Brinkley,’ and they insisted on an exclusive.”): It costs money to bring small nuclear explosives back from Europe safely. We know by now the record of the Defense and Energy departments in managing nuclear-weapons facilities right here at home, when they just had their ordinary supply of funds, nothing extra for stopping. Cleaning up their mess vies with the savings-and-loan bailout for honors as the most expensive new government program. Hundreds of billions. The business pages call it a growth industry.
But, hey, it probably cost money to stop working at the GM plant in Van Nuys, the one that recently closed down forever. Whom do those workers bill for the cost of learning to do something else somewhere else? If they’d had the good sense to be building Stealth bombers that can’t hide from radar--instead of Chevys that can’t outsell Toyotas--they could bill all of us.
It costs money to stop doing almost everything. Simply winding down his sex life is costing Paul Reubens a bundle. But in normal life, the cost of knocking something off is borne, appropriately enough, by those who are least able to pay. Just ask the people who are financing Charles Keating’s graceful withdrawal from finance.
Only in the magical world of national defense can not doing something cost the American taxpayers more than doing it. Just one other industry even comes close: the petroleum marketers who charge us more for leaving the lead out than for putting it in.
Recently, conservatives have been complaining that Ronald Reagan doesn’t receive enough credit for ending the Cold War. His brilliant stroke was to envision an arms race so ruinously costly that it would drive the Soviet economy onto the rocks. A man and his dream. However, if you buy that, you also have to buy this: Gorbachev realized his economy was being bled white by the arms race long before somebody in our government realized that it was turning us a paler shade of gray, too.
America’s defense industry, after all, was like a junior version of the entire Soviet economy; large enterprises grown fat on selling products to one customer, prices to be negotiated (sometimes with the aid of bribes), defects glossed over until they cost billions to fix. Meanwhile, the Germans, the Japanese and everyone else in the industrialized world enjoyed the show while busily making cars, digital samplers, semiconductors--everything, short of food and cheap clothing, that people actually want and need.
The Russians, the Soviets--whatever we’re supposed to call them now--are cutting back on their army and their nuclear forces in response to Bush’s initiatives and to the insistent scream of reality. But, backward to the end, they’re probably going to save money by making those cutbacks. What chumps.
