So where will the extra $16 trillion come from to pay for Sanders' plan?

[ehrnst]

151. "Cutting the defense budget in half"

What magic wand will do that?

And economics is not a puzzle where you pull out one piece, and none of the others is affected.

It's an ecosystem. If you cut the defense budget in half, thousands of jobs vanish. Just like taking out a wolf population - you might be saving your livestock, but the ripple effects on the rest of the ecosystem can be devastating.

I'm not just talking about the evil Halliburton jobs, or weapons manufacturers - I'm talking about the lunch places, the small businesses that depend on the military - the ones around the base: printers, couriers, coffee supply delivery, and the contractors - the technical writers, the janitorial staff, the administrative people, the teachers in the base schools.

You can't just shut that off all at once. You have to phase things out, over a period of years in order to mitigate the damage to the local economies surrounding the military. You might say that they were wrong to make money off the war machine, but these people built livelihoods and businesses that don't involve killing anyone.

That loss of local jobs has to be included in the costs of implementation if you cut the military budget that steeply. And no one has talked about how that would work.