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Article: Can taxpayers count on a "peace dividend"?
- Article from:
- USA TODAY
- Article date:
- July 1, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Society for the Advancement of Education. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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If the cold war is over, why aren't factories, military bases, and laboratories converting to civilian work? What's going on is a permanent war economy in which military activity is large and continuous, and the military output is treated as an ordinary economic product. How did a national consensus that favored defense, as during World War II, get transformed into a permanent war economy?
A good place to start is with NSC-68, "The Report by the Secretaries of State and Defense on United States Objectives and Programs for National Security," April 7, 1950. In its economic conclusions, this policy paper - often attributed to Paul Nitze - concluded that ". . . one ...