I KNOW HOW TO END THE DEFICIT!

From CNN courtesy of AlterNet:

Tab for 'War on terrorism' tops $1 trillion

The United States has spent more than $1 trillion on wars since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, a recently released Congressional report says.

Adjusting for inflation, the outlays for conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere around the world make the "war on terrorism" second only to World War II.

More here.

To some small extent, I'm being facetious--for the last two years, the federal budget deficit has been hovering around $1.25 trillion dollars; ending the "War on Terrorism," its military aspect at least, would only pay off a single year's worth of deficit. But more generally, in terms of the insanely bloated US military budget, an amount of spending that has us always ready to fight wars against everybody at once, no seriously, everybody at once, the government already has enough money to pay for everything. All we have to do is radically scale down our military such that it is truly a defense force, rather than capitalism's global enforcer.

Of course, we'd have to get off the oil. We'd have to revive our once mighty domestic manufacturing base. But those are actually good things with dramatic benefits for our economy. Unfortunately, a significant minority of Americans make a lot of money off of oil and the slave-based economies of the third world, and they use that money to control the political elites who make such decisions: even though ending the American Empire in order to restore the American Republic is absolutely the best thing to do for our great nation, the greedy pieces of shit who profit from our empire status like things just the way they are, which means we absolutely have to burn trillions on the military to keep the whole system going.

It's all very unstable, but as long as the rich keep getting richer, what's the problem?

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