The US needs to
reduce spending and probably, to everyone’s displeasure, increase revenue
(raise taxes) if something is to be done about the deficit. What do you cut? Medicare, Social Security, Foreign Aid, Program
Grants, military spending? No doubt all of these expenditures need to be
adjusted. I have no claims to have more
than pedestrian knowledge about the US budget and expenditure but I do read about
it and listed to pundits and those in government.
I read an
interesting article in the January 28, 2013 issue of New Yorker Magazine
entitled “The Force How much military is Enough?” by Jill Lepore
The article deals exclusively
with the issue of military spending. I
think military spending should be cut, with everything else. Some of the interesting points in the article
include:
The United States spends more on
defense than all the other nations of the world combined. Between 1998 and
2011, military spending doubled, reaching more than seven hundred billion
dollars a year—more, in adjusted dollars, than at any time since the Allies
were fighting the Axis.
In 1934, the publication of “Merchants
of Death,” a best-seller and a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, contributed to
the formation, that year, of the Senate Munitions Committee, headed by Gerald
P. Nye, a North Dakota Republican. Not coincidentally, that was also the
year Congress passed the National Firearms Act, which, among other things,
strictly regulated the private ownership of machine guns. (Keeping military
weapons out of the hands of civilians seemed to the Supreme Court, when it
upheld the Firearms Act, in 1939, entirely consistent with the Second
Amendment, which provides for the arming of militias.) For two years, Nye
led the most rigorous inquiry into the arms industry that any branch of the
federal government has ever conducted. He convened ninety-three hearings. He
thought the ability to manufacture weapons should be restricted to the
government. “The removal of the element of profit from war would materially
remove the danger of more war,” he said. That never came to pass, partly
because Nye was unable to distinguish his opposition to arms profiteering from
his advocacy of isolationism, a position that had become indefensible.
"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 not clothed. This is a world
in arms. 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.
. . . This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of
threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. "
Look at this quote from Eisenhower at the end of his presidency:
In the councils of government, we must
guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or
unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower warned then. “Only an
alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge
industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and
goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
Lockheed Martin is the largest or one of the largest military equipment provider to the US. The New Yorker article states:
Lockheed Martin is the largest or one of the largest military equipment provider to the US. The New Yorker article states:
Lockheed Martin contributed to the
campaigns of nine of the twelve members of the congress Supercommittee (budget
issues), fifty-one of the sixty-two members of the House Armed Services
Committee, twenty-four of the twenty-five members of that committee’s
Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces—in all, to three hundred and
eighty-six of the four hundred and thirty-five members of the 112th Congress.
I think our elected leaders are making spedning decisions based, in part, as paid minions of Lockheed and other military contractors.
Six decades after V-J Day (the end of World War II) nearly three
hundred thousand American troops are stationed overseas, including fifty-five
thousand in Germany, thirty-five thousand in Japan, and ten thousand in Italy.
Much of the money that the federal government spends on “defense” involves
neither securing the nation’s borders nor protecting its citizens. Instead, the
U.S. military enforces American foreign policy.
Read the article if you get a chance.
Read the article if you get a chance.
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