Bloated Budget

Well, if you are reading or listening to the news you saw that the administration is finally addressing the exorbitant pentagon spending. Did you realize that about 45% of the total budget of 1 Trillion dollars is slated for the military? Incredible, no wonder we have wars.

Let’s get a grip on ourselves and look at how things work. To start off, if you allot, decide that you will spend, x dollars for something then you obviously will spend it there won’t you? Okay, not to sound ridiculous, my point is this. Let’s say I have allotted $1,000 a month to buy a new car. Then when I go shopping for a car I’ll spend as close to that number, if not a little more than I allotted because I said it was okay to do so. I could buy a car for a lot less and spend less and allocate some of it for something else, couldn’t I. I’m sure you’re getting the point.

So can you guess why we are at war so often? That’s right because we said that we needed $500 billion dollars for the military. Let’s face it, the military is not really a peace keeping organization. Okay, so now you’re saying something like well we need $500 billion for the war in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever we decide to make war. It’s kind of the same old question of “what came first the chicken or the egg?” If we didn’t allocate so much for defense we wouldn’t be so quick to go to war because we wouldn’t have the resources. If you’re a hawk you’ll fight this logic tooth and nail because you like war.

What we hear a lot of is that we don’t have enough teachers or we can’t have more clinics or we can’t have great health care, etc. because we don’t have enough money in the budget. Whoa, let’s hold on doggies. Why don’t we just allocate more money for health and living programs as opposed to killing and dying programs? Seems to me that more people want death and war than they want life and peace. Or is it that the few who have the power want the death and war programs.

Has anyone done a poll to see how many people want to be at war? Now don’t ask the question if we should be at war, just ask if there were no war now and no reason to go to war (is there ever?) how many people would want war? I’m guessing it would be a very small percentage.

You see it is exactly at times like these where we must ask ourselves the hard yet practical question. Where is our money, your money, best spent? How much do we really need to defend ourselves? Remember we are on the offense not on the defense and offense costs a lot more than a defense.

I can buy into having a military to be trained for defending a potential threat and at the same time they could be doing other constructive things barring making war because we think someone is about to do attack us. We could have a much smaller military budget using the money to build infrastructure and help all of us here at home.

We have so many excuses for war and so few for peace. Stand up for your rights, our rights, to make peace, to make jobs, to make love and to make sense. I especially like the make love part. Somewhere I heard someone say, “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Pick up your pen and write your congressman and have them pick up their pen and sign a budget and a bill that makes sense(cents?). Slash that military spending.

Love to hear from you, even the hawks, I am open minded, sometimes.