Is it time to kill the trillion dollars/year War Department budget?

[Karmadillo]

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/04/10/see-pentagon-budget-cuts-as-possible/

<edit>

“After 13 consecutive years of growth, between 1998 and 2011, spending on the military has reached an all-time high,” and for 2012 the Pentagon’s Robert Gates “is asking Congress to authorize yet another increase, seeking $553 billion, plus an additional $118 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan, for a total of $671 billion,” Dreyfuss writes. Throw in all war spending, homeland defense ($44 billion), Veterans Affairs ($122 billion), interest on military debt ($48 billion) and the war machine is costing the public in excess of $1 trillion a year.

“It’s so much money,” Dreyfuss writes, President Obama’s own National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform(NCFRR) pointed out the $80 billion the U.S. spends on military R&D alone “surpassed China’s entire military budget by more than $10 billion.” Overall, Dreyfuss writes, the U.S. spends as much on military “as the rest of the world combined.”

<edit>

A March poll, Dreyfuss notes, revealed that 51 percent favor reductions in military spending versus just 28 percent who would cut Medicare and Medicaid and 18 percent who’d cut Social Security.

<edit>

Personally, I prefer my own Ross Plan to all of the cuts suggested above. The Ross Plan would require the Peace Corps and the Pentagon to switch budgets and personnel numbers. Restricted to $400 million a year and 8,600 troops the Pentagon couldn’t possibly raise all the hell it does. And with a $1 trillion budget and three million workers, the Peace Corps, (which candidate Obama promised to double from 7,800 to 16,000 by 2011 but, of course, never has) might just work wonders.

[blindpig]

1. To kill it you must kill the reason for it.

Kill Capitalism.

[Wounded Bear]

2. About 30 years late by my calculation....

Give or take a few years....

:shrug:

[davidthegnome]

3. Long past time...

K & R