Blog Catalog

Friday, February 27, 2009

Enough!

As I stated earlier here, the United States puts more money every year into defense spending than any other nation on the planet.

And we beat everyone else out BIG TIME.

We spend approximately $713 billion dollars annually on this crap.

Who's number 2?

It's a shocker, really.

The entire EU.

And even then, they are all back at $311 billion dollars annually.

Did you think it was going to be China?

It's not.

All that money and materiel could and should go to far more intelligent and logical needs in the country and world.

Think of what it could go for.

--Health care.

--Schools.

--Vocational education (for students who aren't as good at the fine arts but are good with their hands).

--Infrastructure.

--Solar technology.

So much more and better things it could attend to.

But no, we want to--and do--build ships and bombs and bullets and guns and planes, instead.

Stupid.

Truly stupid.

And wasteful.

And paranoid.

Think of it.

Why is the United States still in Aviano, Italy?

That is SO World War II.

And Okinawa, Japan? (To defend against Korea and China, right).

And Germany?

Germany? Are you kidding me? Does anyone really think any longer that tanks are going to start rumbling from Russia--or what was Russia--into Eastern and Western Europe?

As a people, we need to push our government and our officials to start thinking anew about all this. We need to stop fighting 40-year old wars.

And we need to stop feeding the corporate war machines.


Link to data on worldwide defense spending:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures

2 comments:

GOPnot4me said...

Make's Eisenhauer look like Nostradamus, doesn't it?

When I served, the wastefulness in the military procurement system was appalling.

It was estimated that 50% of military spending could not be accounted for.

And that was more than 30 years ago!

I'm one pissed off Vet.

Mo Rage said...

Thanks, GOPnot4me. Always good to hear from you!