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Is America building a purely military economy?
A recent article in the New York Times, entitled "Why a Recovery May Still Feel Like a Recession," has buried in it some startling statistics about the direction of the US economy.
Floyd Norris' article points out that durable-goods shipments -- a basic measure of industrial production -- "fell by more than 20 percent during this recession, and would have declined further were it not for increased production of weapons."
The use of the military-industrial complex as a quick, if dubious, way of jump-starting the economy is nothing new, but what is amazing is the divergence between the military economy and the civilian economy, as shown by this New York Times chart.
In the past nine years, non-industrial production in the US has declined by some 19 percent. It took about four years for manufacturing to return to levels seen before the 2001 recession -- and all those gains were wiped out in the current recession.
By contrast, military manufacturing is now 123 percent greater than it was in 2000 -- it has more than doubled while the rest of the manufacturing sector has been shrinking.