Time to Cut Pentagon Spending - Now

 

But first a little history lesson.

 

WWII was so long ago that almost everyone forgets that we never had a permanent standing army before them. After the few wars we previously fought, the soldiers went back home to raise their families, grow some crops, run a local business.

 

That was the conservative position (i.e., vastly different from the neo-con pretenders). America's role was not to be the bully / policemen of the world. National security meant defending our borders. And with the oceans being two of our borders, and two allies (Canada and Mexico) being the other borders, US was and still is one of the safest countries in the world in terms of external military threats.

 

President Eisenhower, the Leader of the Allied Forces, knew that he was giving the country a raw deal when he decided to perpetuate the Cold War against the Soviet Union launched by Truman. While he felt he had no choice, he felt guilty enough that his farewell address to the country warned us to guard against the growing power and threat to democracy (and corruption) of the Congressional-Military-Industrial complex (he chickened out at the last moment and deleted the Congressional part).

 

Needless to say his mea culpa didn't do much to curb the money-devouring monster he had unleashed on America - and the world.

 

No one knows how much we really spend on the military.. The low-ball estimate is that it is $700 billion (a 100% increase in the last decade) but most believe it runs over a trillion dollars when you add in interest payments from past wars, nuclear weapons, intelligence gathering, Veteran benefits, Homeland Security, etc.

 

The military budget is so out-of-control and hidden in so many places that it has never been audited, making it wide open for fraud and theft.   There was an effort late in the Clinton administration to start reconciling transactions with documentation in the Department of Defense. They audited $7 trillion in transactions and found that they could not justify $2.3 trillion of it.   In 2011, the General Accounting Office reported "serious financial-management problems at the Department of Defense that made its financial statements unauditable".

 

The standard line is that 54 cents out of every discretionary dollar in the federal budget is spent on the military. More than half of tax revenues go to the military.   We spend as much on the military as the rest of the world combined - and most of the other big spenders are our military allies.

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