Judd Legum1. A few days ago, Congress and Biden approved $858 BILLION in military spending with almost no public discussion or debate.
That's $858,000,000,000
Follow along for FACTS about HOW this money is spent and WHY
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2. More than HALF of all military spending ($452 BILLION) will go to private defense contractors
3. In 2022, the defense industry employed 770 federal lobbyists. That's almost 2 lobbyists for every member of Congress.
In the first three quarters of 2022, the defense industry "spent over $101 million on federal lobbying."
4. In the 2022 cycle, defense industry PACs and executives donated $18.9 million to federal candidates.
The money was spread relatively equally between Republicans ($10.3 million) and Democrats ($8.6 million).
5. Only one House Democrat (@[email protected]) voted against the omnibus bill, citing excessive military spending.
Many Republicans voted against the bill because they thought there was too much spent on domestic priorities and not enough on the military
@[email protected] 6. The S&P 500 index declined 19.4% in 2022.
But Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman each saw their stock price increase in 2022 by more than 35%.
@[email protected] 7. In 2015, United States military spending was $585 billion, more than the next 11 countries combined.
Since then, military spending has increased by $273 billion
@[email protected] 8. The budget of the Pentagon now exceeds "the budgets for the next ten largest cabinet agencies combined." Current defense spending, after adjusting for inflation, "is higher than it was at any point during the Cold War."
@[email protected] 9. While Republicans and some Democrats insist domestic spending is "paid for" w/budget cuts or tax increases, military spending is routinely financed with deficit spending
More details on why we are spending $858 billion on the military next year here:
$858,000,000,000
In 2015, the United States spent $585 billion on its military, more than the next 11 countries combined. Since then, the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, ending its longest-running war. And yet, eight years later, President Biden approved $858 billion in military spending
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11. The absence of a real public debate does not mean there aren't real tradeoffs to this level of defense spending
One percent of the 2023 defense budget is $8.58 billion
That could finance over 1 million public housing units, enough to effectively end homelessness in the US
12. Would the United States be better off with an $850 billion military budget (instead of $858 billion) and much less homelessness? What about increasing compensation for teachers?
These are all legitimate debates. But these debates are not happening.
Robert Denby@juddlegum No, usually I hear this line of reasoning from people who insist that we must let Ukraine be smothered to death in exchange for domestic spending which would 100% not happen regardless of savings in the military budget. This country has the wealth and the capability to deal with these domestic crises without having to do another kabuki budget cut theater.
The debate is not why we don't trade funds from military to domestic...its why we refuse to invest in our own people. EVER.
FDR
Paranoid Factoid@Bullix @juddlegum Ukraine is a wake up call on the necessity of Defense spending.
@ParanoidFactoid @juddlegum Agreed, AND it has direct, tangible defense benefits for all of NATO as well. Not just because Ukraine is using a fraction of our budgets to geld the rotting facade that was the Russian Federation. But, in so doing, they've also proven the efficacy of NATO's weapons programs AND proves that the doctrine of tech superiority over numbers DOES work very well, something not tested until now.
@ParanoidFactoid @juddlegum That said, I 100% agree with Judd that we need to invest in ourselves. And not just our rich and powerful and our corporate "citizens." But in our ACTUAL citizens. We shouldn't have homeless crises in the richest nation in human history. Its a profanity against human dignity that we allow people to die in the gutter because we're too fucking cheap to help them. Many of them veterans.
The GQP budget hawks have caused many deaths this way.
@ParanoidFactoid @juddlegum
I say that arguing over cutting fractions of budgets and ignoring the actual societal question of whether it is moral for a rich country to have throngs of starving, hopeless, often mentally ill people dying of preventable causes just so some rich fuck can get yet another tax cut. It is time to engage the GQP assumptions that have been allowed to hold sway for decades head on.
No, it is not right for there to be this crisis when we have billionaires not paying taxes
Who's arguing billionaires shouldn't pay taxes here?
I just think the Defense money is well spent right now, given Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
@ParanoidFactoid @juddlegum
No one, and I feel it is well spent also. But the unspoken assumption of the posts that talk about how a fraction of one budget should really not be spent because it could so help in another area of policy is that we cannot do both. And we absolutely can. Unless we continue to just not tax corporations and the mega-wealthy.
And it's an across the board domestic problem. I argue for investing in us AND continuing the defense budget that is working.
Guns and butter. We're all LBJ now.
@ParanoidFactoid @juddlegum Yes! Minus the picking dogs up by their ears thing, lol.
But he did start the Great Society platform, if memory serves.
@ParanoidFactoid @juddlegum MY unspoken assumption is that our domestic spending has left us with a crumbling country full of programs that would work...if they were funded enough to do so. And the cause has been 40 years of republicon budget hawks playing the budget trade off kabuki theater while simultaneously giving huge tax breaks to their donor class. With a reasonable tax code, we could have both. Thats me saying that part.