TY - BOOK ID - 136142628 TI - How Does Defense Spending Affect Economic Growth? AU - Rooney, Bryan AU - Johnson, Grant AU - Priebe, Miranda PY - 2021 PB - Santa Monica, Calif. RAND Corporation DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:136142628 AB - Like all new administrations, U.S. President Joseph Biden's administration will reassess and possibly change the size of the U.S. defense budget. Such a decision involves balancing trade-offs; a larger budget gives the country more funds to promote and defend its global interests, it but also reduces funds available for domestic programs, including those that might do more to boost economic growth. The economic trade-offs associated with defense spending have been underexamined compared with other aspects of the debate about U.S. grand strategy. Yet these trade-offs might be of greater public interest in coming years. In early 2021, as the United States remains in a recession amid the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, questions about how different budget choices affect economic performance might become more salient. Once the immediate crisis has passed, the country will have an even larger public debt than before and might also have to grapple with the question of what level of defense spending is sustainable in the long term. In this report — the first in a series on the security and economic trade-offs associated with competing visions for U.S. grand strategy — the authors examine the relationship between U.S. defense spending and economic growth. To do so, they consider what the effect on growth would be if the United States were to adopt any one of three policy changes: reallocate funds between defense spending and infrastructure investments, change its overall level of defense spending and apply the difference to public debt, or increase taxes to finance defense spending. ER -