Sid, I believe this is the quote you are looking for, from "Dismantling Defense: Use Conversion to Create Jobs," The Nation, 7/12/93, pp. 66-68. The quote may not be exact, since I'm taking it off my disk rather than the printed version that, as always, got negotiated over down to the last comma. But the point is the same. As the passage tries to convey, the underlying ideas really come from the work of Markusen and Yudkin: "Still, stinginess is not even the most serious problem with Clinton's proposal. Its basic premise is that the purpose of conversion is to ease the transition of military-dependent workers and firms onto the provate economy, with the benevolent forces of the market handling matters from that point. This fails to recogize that for all its bad features, ranging from the wasteful to the nefarious, military spending has also brought substantial benefits to the economy that the market cannot duplicate. "As Ann Markusen and Joel Yudkin have documented in Dismantling the Cold War Economy, the Pentagon provided the foundation for the postwar development of the aerospace, communications and electronics industries--the most successful U.S. industries over this period, both as technological innovators and as exporters. They flourished because the Pentagon offered research and development subsidies, guaranteed markets and protection from foreign competition. In addition, as Reaganomics demonstrated vividly, increasing the Pentagon's budget through deficit spending has been a powerful vehicle for boosting the economy out of recessions, since nearly all of the Pentagon's largesse is spent in the domestic market rather than on imports. Military spending, in short, has been America's most effective industrial and economic stimulus policy. Any realistic conversion program must replicate these salutary features of the military budget elsewhere in the economy." -- Bob Pollin