Episode
S9 Ep29: Guns and Butter
- Podcast
- VoxTalks Economics
- Published
- May 15, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1262
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://audioboom.com/posts/8903915
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Summary
Europe's NATO members have pledged 3.5% of GDP to rearmament. The political argument is already about which social programmes will be sacrificed to pay for this, when the government chooses guns instead of butter. What does history tell us about what politicians will do? Christoph Trebesch and Johannes Marzian spent four years assembling the Global Budget Database: 150 years of primary government budget documents from 20 countries, with 116 identified military spending booms in peace and war. They find that governments almost never cut social spending when they rearm; they expand both military and welfare budgets simultaneously. The bill arrives later, as higher taxes. Top income rates typically rise by 10 to 15 percentage points in the decade following a military boom, funded mainly through broad-based income and value-added taxes. With rearmament underway, will history repeat itself? The research behind this episode: Marzian, Johannes, and Christoph Trebesch. 2026. "Guns and Butter: The Fiscal Consequences of Rearmament and War." CEPR Discussion Paper 21193. [Gated] To cite this episode: Phillips, Tim, and Christoph Trebesch. 2026. "Guns and Butter." VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE. About the guest Christoph Trebesch is Director of the Research Center on International Finance at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and Professor of Macroeconomics at Kiel University. His research spans sovereign debt, financial crises, China's role in global finance, the economics of populism, and the long-run fiscal history of military spending. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). In 2024 he received the Hermann Heinrich Gossen Award, Germany's…