Civil expenditure

The defence departments also had to compete with political pressure for extra Exchequer funds to help to deal with the housing problem that had worsened during the war (when few houses were built), as well as to pay for health services and education. Churchill, when arguing in 1924 for a reduction in the naval estimates, referred to the need to spend money on social reform. Failure to do so, he warned, would lead to a Socialist victory in the next election, and greater cuts in naval expenditure. There were also pressures to build roads and to provide other social infrastructure. Between 1932/3 and 1938/9 civil expenditure of all kinds that had to be paid for out of the chancellor s budget increased by 70 million, or 20 per cent. ... 

Government military expenditure Government civil expenditure Consumer expenditure Net non-war capital formation... 

A comparison of table 6.7 with the comparable figures in tables 1.1, 3.2 and 5.3 shows that in the post-war period defence took up a higher proportion of GDP down to 1968/9 than had been the case in the ten years before the First World War or in the years 1920/1 to 1936/7 inclusive. Moreover, whereas the rise in defence expenditure in the late 1930s had been at a time of high unemployment, the competition between civil and military use of labour and capital was much greater in conditions of full employment after the Second World War. In these circumstances economic analysis suggests that defence expenditure contributed to Britain s slower economic growth compared with countries that devoted less of GDP to defence. A study of fourteen advanced... 

The biggest expenditure of the Alabama legislature the first year after the (civil) war was for wooden legs. 

The increasing number of empty seats on airliners has reduced the civil transportation market, the cuts in overall military expenditure are compromising this industry s role as a spur to advanced research and the international space programmes have been reshaped to comply with the available funding. 

But let us advert to the large debt which we have ourselves contracted in a single war, and let us only calculate on a common share of the events which disturb the peace of nations, and we shall instantly perceive without the aid of any elaborate illustration, that there must always be an immense disproportion between the objects of Federal and State expenditures. It is true that several of the States separately are incumbered with considerable debts, which are an excrescence of the late war. But when these are discharged, the only call for revenue of any consequence, which the State Governments will continue to experience, will be for the mere support of their respective civil lists to which, if we add all contingencies, the... 

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