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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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My thoughts exactly. Somehow, year after year, we can always come up with $800B+ for the offense budget ($842B FY2024) and that never gets seriously questioned, despite the US not being technically at war with any other major or minor powers. The offense budget is always a "must pass" proposition, whereas spending that actually helps Americans, like Medicare, Medicaid, and SS, are treated/portrayed as some sort of obscene "entitlements" that only the most profligate and immoral nations would ever direct tax money to. Those, and any kind of non-military infrastructure, are just examples of coddling the undeserving citizenry. Investing in the means to kill "foreigners", in contrast, is money well spent!
The whole "standing army" paradigm needs to be scrapped and the sooner the better.
On the flip side, the DoD is the biggest socialist organization in the government and employs literally millions of Americans. And while the US isn't at war, they have a lot of international allies that they support and prop up. (that being said, the defense budget is pretty obscene. And the support of Israel is maybe not the best way to spend it.)
Yes, the Department of Offense IS a socialist organization. But the fact that it has to do with offense and killing and 'projecting power' and bribing 'friendlies' with money and weapons while scaring 'unfriendlies' with the same, does not whitewash it into acceptability. We could, and should, take that roughly $850B/yr and plow it into domestic infrastructure, public R&D (no patents or other encumbrances), education, public health care, social supports (such as Medicare/SS), the Arts, basic research, the sciences (climate, space, etc), public housing and clean energy generation to name a few things. We could do all this if it weren't for the fact that in the US the only acceptable form of public spending is public spending on weapons of war, on the means of bullying and killing those who we don't like or who won't cooperate with us. By all means, we should keep up the socialist spending, but it should be directed in such a way as to improve the lives of the citizens directly, not just as hypothetical trickle-down improvements from making ever more deadly and expensive killing technologies.
Just a few hours from me is the Grand Coulee Dam, built in the 1930s and one of the Wonders of the World. There's no reason that we couldn't be engaged on projects of this scope and size all the time, but nope, that's evil socialism, and big government-funded projects are only acceptable in America if they directly have to do with providing us with new or better weapons to wield against Those People (foreigners mainly).