Billions for defense, not much left for the rest of us
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/trillions-for-war-pennies-for-people-how-soaring-military-spending-fails-americans I won’t let Reagan off the hook — there was plenty of waste back then, but today it’s worse. We’ve built an expansive, “cover-the-globe” strategy, trying to be everything, everywhere at once. We’re overstretched, inefficient, and spending over half of the military budget — 54% —on Pentagon contractors. When you combine all these factors, a clear picture emerges — what we call the “Trillion Dollar War Machine” — showing where all this money is going and why it’s not actually making us more secure. William Hartung: Basically, we’re asking the smaller military to undertake missions impossible: impose democracy at the barrel of a gun, reconstruct a country at the same time it’s being destroyed. We’ve had 20-year wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where the U.S. spent more and had superior technology, but that didn’t determine the outcom...