Saturday, August 06, 2011

The US Defense Budget As Holy Scripture

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has taken as stand. Better that children starve and the elderly be sent to early graves than US soldiers in Afghanistan sweat while sleeping like they were peasants.

The US Defense budget is a bloated obscenity. It has long ago ceased being a sacred cow and is worshiped today like an obscene golden calf .
If Panetta sees this he'll want it for an Air Force toilet.
The facts are that the Pentagon budget could be cut in half and it would still be larger than it was when George Bush Jr. took office in 2001.
In real dollars, adjusting for inflation, the United States Defense budget is higher than anytime in the past 65 years. The Korean War, even the Vietnam War, were mere blips compared to what the United States is spending today during our current military orgy.
The United States spends six times more money on defense ($700 billion) than No. 2 China ($114 billion). The United States is responsible for almost half of all the military spending in the entire world. We spend nearly 5% of the nation's GDP on defense compared to the global average of 2.6%. (source)
Who are the enemies we are fighting that justifies this spending? A few thousand Muslim extremists. What have we gotten for the money? A military that has spent a decade failing to win a war in a country the size of Texas with the economy of the poorest third of El Paso.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Aside from the shear inhumanity of turning our soldiers into cannon fodder for no useful purpose, we also seem to ignore that the arrogance of spending money to portray power has killed more than one country, most recently, the USSR. This is already terrible and it will get worse as long as presidents are seduced to keep repeating the mistakes of Viet Nam.