DarrylS

America is weirdly at peace with perpetual war...

Recently have heard Romney blowing his horn about increasing military spending, also heard that Paul Ryan is blowing a similar trumpet.. somehow we are "stripping the military of its power" by the current cuts. Obama has produced some cuts, but they are not all that significant.. currently our defense budget is about 1 trillion per year..

Reagan started a lot of this, to protect our territory "Panama" (he campaigned on those words) and to protect us from the commies, and subsequently no one has broken his lead, our defense spending is out of control.

Since Nixon time and time again, our presidents have avoided congress to go to wars.. initially in Cambodia all the way up to Libya, it is not a coincidence that Cheney/Rumsfield were behind a lot of these forays, and firmly believed that despite the constitution, the president had the power... to the point where a president can now sidestep congress.

Now we have a huge private army, run by profiteers, who are not under the president or congress.. what could go wrong????

Our DOD Base Budget is 530.5 525.4 Widely reported by the press as the "base" DOD budget, and our Overseas Contingency Operations 115.1 88.5, add to that DOE/Nuclear (Total) 18.5 19.4, International Affairs (Total) 61.3 69.8 Includes $8.2 billion in OCO for Budget Function 150. The OCO grand total is $96.7 billion.

Veterans Affairs (Total) 124.6 137.7 This spending encompasses the effects of past and current wars; spending for veterans of the last ten years will be increasing dramatically in coming years.

Homeland Security (Total) 46.0 46.3 Includes HS spending in DHS and all federal agencies not shown on this summary.

Subtotal of the Above 928.7 930.6 Total Federal Spending is $3.8 trillion in outlays in 2012 and 2013.

The founding fathers intent, obvious from their writings, was to call upon citizens to protect the country only when it was directly threatened. America came to maintain a standing army; something that became important as technology advanced and response times needed to be stepped up. Over time,as Eisenhower warned, the Military Industrial Complex" has grown into an uncontrollably hungry monster - gobbling up a majority of our resources without giving anything in return; well, maybe false security.

Likewise, Congressional power to declare war has been eroded to the point where one person, our president, can make war in our name with our money without anyone else's consent. Congress has been sidestepped.. under some strange guise that one person knows best.

This has nothing to do with one political party or another. It all concerns we the people, our addiction to conflict, our penchant for sticking our noses in many peoples business, our addiction to cozying up in our own comfortable lives while paying others to do our dirty work.

We have moved out of Iraq, and planning to get out of Afghanistan.. and currently we as a country maintain and supply 700+ military bases around the world, including 287 In germany, 89 in Italy, 57 in Great Britain and 130 in Japan.. that is a lot of supplies to move around.

How come no one ever talks about the "peace dividend", and why are we so focused on government spending/entitlements when this military behemoth is completely out of control????

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"Being the best doesn't mean you always win. It just means you win more than anyone else".. tweet from Kurt Warner to Tom Brady.