Guns, Butter, and Debt: Balancing Spending Tradeoffs between Defense, Social Programs, and Budget Deficits

The objective of this chapter is to provide empirical evidence of budgetary tradeoffs between defense and various domestic programs in the US federal budget for the period 1954-86. To accomplish this objective, we operationalize the idea of budgetary tradeoffs, incorporate the budget deficit as an additional component of the tradeoff, develop an alternative budgetary indicator, and test its utility in detecting spending tradeoffs.