Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.

The deficit commission, better known as the “Super Committee,” failed to produce a plan to cut deficit spending by $1.2 trillion over the next ten years.  According to the ground rules of the agreement that created the commission, its failure is supposed to trigger approximately $1 trillion in “automatic” spending cuts that will go into effect beginning January 2013.

The agreement included the following stipulations for guiding the automatic cuts:

• Approximately 50% of the required reduction is to come from the so-called security budget (national security operations and military costs).
• Approximately 32% is to come from non-defense discretionary programs (health, education, drug enforcement, national parks and other agencies and programs).
• About 12% is come from Medicare (reduced payments to Medicare providers and plans).
• The rest is to come mostly from agricultural programs.

To be clear, these are reductions to be made in projected budget lines.  In other words, the cuts to the security budget will not produce an actual decline in security spending, only a slowdown in the projected increase previously agreed to by Congress.

As I previously argued, the failure of the commission is a good thing.  The commission was actively considering structural changes to a number of key social programs.  One was to change the formula for calculating social security payments so as to reduce them.  Another was to raise the age at which people could access Medicare. The automatic cuts, if enacted, will reduce spending on important programs, but at least they do not include steps towards their dismantling.  In fact, Social Security and Medicaid are exempt.

The next stage of the budget battle has now begun.  Political forces are maneuvering to change the formula for the automatic cuts mandated by the budget agreement.  In fact, this maneuvering began weeks before the commission formally announced its failure to agree on a deficit cutting plan.  According to a November 5, 2011 New York Times report:

Several members of Congress, especially Republicans on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, are readying legislation that would undo the automatic across-the-board cuts totaling nearly $500 billion for military programs, or exchange them for cuts in other areas of the federal budget.

I believe that we need to enter the fray with a different plan, one that includes blocking further cuts to non-defense discretionary programs and Medicare.  It is worth recalling that the agreement that established the deficit commission already included approximately $1 trillion in cuts to non-defense discretionary programs.

It is the security budget that we need to focus on.  And we need to be clear that our aim in demanding cuts to that budget, as well as tax increases on the wealthy and corporations, is to help generate funds to support an aggressive federal program of economic restructuring not deficit reduction.

The table below makes clear just how important it is to target the security budget. It shows the pattern of  federal spending on discretionary programs, defense and non-defense, over the years 2001 to 2010.  The big winner was the Department of Defense, which captured 64.6% of the total increase in discretionary spending over those years.  It was still the big winner, at 36.9%, even if one subtracts out war costs.

While the defense gains are staggering, they do not include spending increases enjoyed by other key budget areas dedicated to the military.  For example, many costs associated with our nuclear weapons program are contained in the Energy Department budget.  Many military activities are financed out of the NASA budget.  And then there is Homeland Security, Veteran Affairs, and International Assistance Programs.  It would not be a stretch to conclude that more than 75% of the increase in spending on discretionary programs over the period 2001 to 2010 went to support militarism and repression. No wonder our social programs and public infrastructure has been starved for funds.

There is no way we can hope to reshape our economy without taking on our government’s militaristic foreign and domestic policy aims and the budget priorities that underpin them.