The death of Osama bin Laden, while a tremendous boost to American morale, will have little economic or fiscal impact in the United States the way that the fall of communism had 22 years earlier /..../ "In the near term, this does not change spending at all," says Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. "We still have to dismantle, disrupt Al Qaeda. And we still have a country to put back together in Afghanistan."
This year's budgeted amount for military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan is $115 billion, he says. Next year's budget request is $107 billion.
Similar budget cuts would have to be made for years to match the $188 billion plunge in US military spending (in today's dollars) that occurred between 1985 and 1998, Mr. Harrison says. That decline, called the "peace dividend" because of the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, actually began in 1986 and was prompted in large part by concerns about the growing US deficit.