How Our Trillion-Dollar Empire Is the Cause of Our 'Deficit Problem'

[unhappycamper]

That's $660 Million dollars of C-17s you're looking at. :(


How Our Trillion-Dollar Empire Is the Cause of Our 'Deficit Problem'
AlterNet / By Joshua Holland

December 8, 2010 | The United States spends more on its military and security services than the rest of the world combined, yet in the midst of a major debate over our fiscal situation, that enormous drain on our national treasure isn't really "on the table" in any serious way. Obama's deficit commission recommended cutting the Pentagon's purse, but the thrust of its focus was on veterans' pensions and health-care -- rather than, say, maintaining costly bases to defend such imperiled allies as Italy and Germany -- and the spending reductions were largely symbolic relative to the level of bloat that plagues our security budget.

One often hears that, in very rough terms, about a fifth of the federal budget goes to national security, another fifth pays for Social Security, a fifth or so is spent on Medicare and Medicaid and everything else makes up about 40 percent. But that, like much of the discussion of "defense" spending, is misleading -- it only counts dollars allocated in the annual defense budget, and in “emergency” supplemental bills.

That belies the reality that spending on the American security state is dispersed throughout the federal budget. So while next year’s defense spending, narrowly defined, is expected to come in at $711 billion, when you include all the extra dollars hidden away in other parts of the budget, that number will rise to as high as $1.45 trillion. That would represent around 40 percent of next year’s budget.

With Washington in the grip of deficit hysteria, that’s the elephant in the room whose name is never mentioned. As I wrote last week, the almost universally held belief that the the U.S. faces a deficit problem is wrong, and for two simple reasons. First, we have a very small government compared to the rest of the developed world -- between 2004 and 2007, the U.S. ranked 24th out of 26 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in overall government spending as a share of our economic output. And we also currently have one of the lowest tax burdens -- In 2008, we ranked 26th out of the 30 OECD countries in that category.

Nonetheless, America’s elites have coalesced around the idea that in order to keep our tax rates among the lowest in the wealthy world, we’ll need to swallow some painful “shared sacrifice” (which in Washington usually means working people sacrificing some economic security and the wealthy getting another tax cut). But it’s important to recognize that it’s an ideological choice to view the projected “budget gap” as a structural, economic problem driven primarily by the growth of “entitlements” -- it’s not a belief grounded in objective fact.

[old mark]

1. Working class people not only pay the most to support the military, but we

are traditionally the ones who supply the bodies to fight and to die and be maimed in America's constant wars. We have been at war of some kind with various people around the world since I was in high school in the 1960's, mostly for no real reason except that we have this extensive military and feel compelled to use it.

It is long past time to stop this bullshit and concentrate on the good of people living here in the US rather than fighting people who live thousands of miles away.

Rec.

Mark
Former Sp4, 82nd Airborne Division

[hobbit709]

2. How Rome went broke.