So, the U.S. spends more on defense than the next 7 countries combined, and—according to the article below—”the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations.” That would seem to be the proverbial “elephant in the room” when discussing where our taxpayer money goes. And evidently, the books are cooked and trillions of dollars can’t be tracked.
Yet, many U.S. military families seem to struggle to survive financially.
Something seems to be very wrong with this picture.
Evidently, some other parties besides military families are benefiting from all this money. The ‘Military Industrial Complex’ former President Eisenhower warned everyone about in his Farewell Address is part of a problem that seems to have gone unchecked since his time. Earlier, in his “Chance for Peace” speech (aka: his “Cross of Iron” speech), Eisenhower said:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
But it seems that BOTH Republicans and Democrats don’t bat an eye when asked to approve military budget spending, which seems to keep increasing and is now the biggest in history. In fact, they were almost falling over each other to see how big of an increase they could approve earlier this year. The amount of JUST the increase–$82 billion—was more than the Trump Administration asked for, and it well surpasses Russia’s entire military budget each year.
I think it’s interesting that when Progressive Democrats propose things like universal health care or free college education (that a majority of Americans support, according to polls), everyone in the establishment wing of the Democrat Party, and most everyone in the establishment mainstream press, starts pushing back about how impractical they are being, and they always ask, “How do you expect to pay for it?”
Maybe we can START by looking at that proverbial and ponderous “elephant in the room.”