Progressive American Thought: Republicans calling for more defense spending is insane.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Republicans calling for more defense spending is insane.

The most wasteful spending of the federal government is the defense budget. Huge sums of money - tens of billions of dollars - are blown up - truly blown up. What if that money were invested in the country?

What I found most disturbing about the Republican debate last night was the harping by so many of the candidates - maybe all of them - on how we need to spend more on defense. And they were not challenged by the CNN folks. Our basic defense budget is more than $600 billion. That doesn't count veterans benefits and I don't believe it includes the cost of maintain our 5,000 (!) nuclear weapons - weapons we really can never use and far more than we need for deterrence.

Here is a chart that shows our defense budget is equal to the TOTAL defense expenditures of the seven countries that spend the most on defense other than us. How can any rational person justify spending more?

http://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison

SOURCE: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, April 2015. Data are for 2014. Compiled by PGPF. NOTE: Figures are in U.S. dollars, converted from local currencies using market exchange rates.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Civil commentary is welcome, including criticism, disagreement, or, hopefully, agreement and support!

Robert LaFollette

Click on his photo to see a film, with sound, of a campaign speech of Robert LaFollette in 1924, when he ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket, urging the people to be “aggressive” in resisting corporate power and influence. He received 17% of the vote and carried only Wisconsin. He died the next year. The father of Progressivism, Robert LaFollette was the first to use the word “Progressive” to describe the movement he started in Wisconsin. He first was Governor of Wisconsin and then was a Senator. From Wikipedia: “In 1957, a Senate Committee selected La Follette as one of the five greatest U.S. Senators, along with Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and Robert Taft. A 1982 survey asking historians to rank the "ten greatest Senators in the nation's history" based on "accomplishments in office" and "long range impact on American history," placed La Follette first, tied with Henry Clay.”

Definition of Progressivism

In using the term “progressive” I mean what it meant in its early years, a philosophy of government, or governance, of the proper role of government in a democracy, and how public officials carry out their responsibilities to the people. Progressive government can be a force for good when it limits its activities to doing those things that need to be done but cannot be done by the people for themselves. The duty of public officials is to all the people, not to special interests.

Progressivism is not a synonym for liberalism, as it often is used today. Today's progressives probably are liberal in many, if not most, of their beliefs, but not all liberals are progressives. Although a descendant of classic liberalism, true progressivism is not ideological. It is pragmatic. It is neither liberal nor conservative, nor Democrat nor Republican. It is not capitalistic, nor socialistic. It seeks to make the existing system work, and that sometimes means protecting capitalism from itself by taming its most aggressive features through legislation and regulation.

Most of the early Progressives were Republicans; the later ones, Democrats. Progressives are problem-solvers and they will borrow ideas from both political parties, as well as from any other source, if the ideas present a practical solution to an important problem.

Basic pragmatic progressivism is more consistent with the American character than any other governmental philosophy, and its historic leaders have been - sometimes, for other reasons, only briefly - among the most popular leaders the nation ever has had. We can solve our major problems with another progressive period of government. I believe this can be made to happen with the right kind of leadership, programs and strategies, which I describe in this book.

- Introduction, Let's Do What Works and Call it Capitalism, by Dan Riker. Excerpts of this as-year unpublished book are posted on this blog, on http://www.danriker.blogspot.com and on http://www.dailykos.com.