Robert Reich has boldly gone where few American pundits have gone before: he has called the US Military an extravagant and woefully inefficient jobs program.  You can find the entire post on Reich’s website, but I have reproduced the guts of his argument below.

Tragically, the same argument could be made about the US criminal justice system which employs 2.4 million people.  The expense can’t compete with military outlays, but the principle is the same.  Americans are willing to spend endlessly on the military and on public safety but are reluctant to fund real jobs programs.  That sounds too much like socialism.

Reich, as you will see, has an interesting way of working around this problem.

America’s biggest — and only major — jobs program is the U.S. military.

Over 1,400,000 Americans are now on active duty; another 833,000 are in the reserves, many full time. Another 1,600,000 Americans work in companies that supply the military with everything from weapons to utensils. (I’m not even including all the foreign contractors employing non-US citizens.)

If we didn’t have this giant military jobs program, the U.S. unemployment rate would be over 11.5 percent today instead of 9.5 percent.

This isn’t an argument for more military spending. Just the opposite. Having a giant undercover military jobs program is an insane way to keep Americans employed. It creates jobs we don’t need but we keep anyway because there’s no honest alternative. We don’t have an overt jobs program based on what’s really needed.

The Pentagon’s budget — and its giant undercover jobs program — keeps expanding. The President has asked Congress to hike total defense spending next year 2.2 percent, to $708 billion. That’s 6.1 percent higher than peak defense spending during the Bush administration.

This sum doesn’t even include Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, nuclear weapons management, and intelligence. Add these, and next year’s national security budget totals about $950 billion.

That’s a major chunk of the entire federal budget. But most deficit hawks don’t dare cut it. National security is sacrosanct.

Yet what’s really sacrosanct is the giant jobs program that’s justified by national security. National security is a cover for job security.

This is nuts.

Wouldn’t it be better to have a jobs program that created things we really need — like light-rail trains, better school facilities, public parks, water and sewer systems, and non-carbon energy sources — than things we don’t, like obsolete weapons systems?

Historically some of America’s biggest jobs programs that were critical to the nation’s future have been justified by national defense, although they’ve borne almost no relation to it. The National Defense Education Act of the late 1950s trained a generation of math and science teachers. The National Defense Highway Act created millions of construction jobs turning the nation’s two-lane highways into four- and six-lane Interstates.

Maybe this is the way to convince Republicans and blue-dog Democrats to spend more federal dollars putting Americans back, and working on things we genuinely need: Call it the National Defense Full Employment Act.