As deadline nears, Senate approves $674 billion defense budget bill

[ehrnst]

8. So we do what we can in other areas - like HHS, Labor and Education.

We hold their budget hostage until we get a guarantee that other programs will be fully funded for the year - no cuts by orange twatwaffle.

The military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about came to pass and is here, whether we like it or not.

And it's not just large corporations that make weapons - it's also small businesses that depend on the local military base, and often entire communities have grown up around military installations.

We can argue about the morality of depending on the military for the business at your restaurant, delivery service, printing service, dry cleaner, tailor, catering, filmmakers, photography, event planners, etc, but they are also part of the economy that depends on Defense spending.

Military spending should come down, but it will need to come down incrementally to allow for those small, local businesses to adjust. It would be political suicide for any party to slash the defense budget in half in one year. The ripple effects through various economies would be fatal to many local communities and businesses.

I haven't even touched on defense spending at universities for research, which makes many scholarships and assistantships possible. I'm not talking about weapons development, but things like reconstructive surgery, prosthetics, high efficiency batteries, GPS and emergency medical procedures (where we got superglue.)

Cutting waste is the first step. I'm not defending the bloat, I'm simply talking about the ramifications of cutting off large amounts of government dollars that go into the economy, which we, as Democrats, know is an ecosystem.