The cost of military domination: “What is never questioned in the political establishment is how a country with crumbling bridges and mass poverty can afford to spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on the military.”

Saturday, May 9, 2015
By Paul Martin

NewsForage.com
5/9/2015

Every passing year in America brings news of cutbacks to essential social programs, from food stamps and home heating assistance to research and infrastructure. The public is told there is no choice because “there is no money” for such programs. What is never questioned in the political establishment is how a country with crumbling bridges and mass poverty can afford to spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on the military.

The officially budgeted military spending of the United States in 2014 was $610 billion, nearly 35 percent of global military spending and greater than the combined spending of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, the UK, India and Germany.
Real annual military spending by the United States is even higher, once nuclear weapons funding, interest payments on foreign wars, and the cost of veteran care is included. With these items, the annual amount is closer to $1 trillion.

Between 2000 and 2006, the US Department of Defense budget rose from $300 billion to over $530 billion, and it continues at those levels, despite the sequester federal budget cuts. For 2016, the President has proposed a total spending amount of $613 billion that would put Pentagon spending higher than any point during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

The proposed $613 billion in funding is more than eight times larger than the federal education budget. It is over 22 times the amount proposed in the discretionary budget for transportation, $27.4 billion, even as the American Society of Civil Engineers rates the state of US infrastructure as a “D,” requiring trillions of dollars in repairs. At current rates, military and intelligence spending between 2015-2020 will exceed $4 trillion.

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