In the longest war in American history, the
In the documentary Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, Halliburton charged $100 for every bag of laundry they washed. Soldiers found the returned clothes so grimy they would often rewash it. The amount of corporate looting in these wars was enormous, a new generation of robber barons. And no one has gone to jail as a result, nor has the money been recovered.
The Pentagon could save billions by canceling the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, which breaks down on average after eight hours of use and is ten years behind schedule. Marines haven't stormed a beach in nearly half a century. We could save $35 billion by reducing our nuclear weapons arsenal - which
The
The economy - and continuing high unemployment, poverty, and low wages - are greater threats to Americans than the deficit, which has been decreasing in recent years, particularly as a percent of the GDP.
If one really believes that the deficit is the country's greatest problem, one would expect that you would try to resolve it by addressing its root causes - the huge "Bush" tax cuts for the wealthy, two unfunded wars, and a Great Recession caused by Wall Street misdeeds in the housing market. Cutting government spending during a very weak recovery from a major recession is a prescription to cause the economy to tank even further - as
With a few exceptions, the big-money groups (e.g., unions) that have fought against sequestration have failed to call for cuts in Pentagon spending. This is a major mistake. "As Eisenhower noted, "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 are not clothed."
A few years ago several dozen children's advocates gathered in NYC to develop an agenda to end child poverty. I said that writing a platform was relatively easy, the real challenge was to pay for it, and that meant calling for cuts in the military budget. A number of participants were indignant that I even brought it up - "that is not what we here for." I said if you don't deal with the revenue issue, all your good ideas are just pipe dreams. The bottom line: we got a meager $400 million annual increase in funding for children nutrition programs, and paid for it by cutting $2 billion from the food-stamp program.
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