Hear the talk:
I will open with the standard line “Statistics don’t lie, people lie with statistics.” How can one ever know the truth about numbers. We are all guessing, but guess we must, because the money being spent by our government impacts our lives. No matter what the true numbers are, a dollar spent on defending our country is a dollar not spent on education, not spent on improving our roads, not spent on medicare, not spent on any other project that would help us in America.
The official, broadcast by our government, defense budget for 2006 is 440 billion dollars. In my last column I mentioned 120 billion -- but that was for the war in Iraq. The total defense budget this year alone? 440 billion dollars. How many people are there in America? 300 million. So each of us is contributing roughly $1,500 dollars to defend ourselves. A family of four? Is spending four times 1,500 dollars, or 6,000 dollars -- and that is this year. You know it will be more next year.
Six thousand dollars for things that blow up, bullets & bombs -- things that all too soon, grow obsolete-- jet planes and tanks, submarines & helicopters. They will soon need to be replaced.
Statistics don’t lie, people lie with statistics. Am I lying, distorting? I might be, I might be exaggerating, or perhaps underestimating. But the trend is clear. Because we spend so much on defense, because we spend so much, buy so much from abroad, the dollar has grown weaker & weaker. We are a debtor nation; we owe people money. People who owe money are beholden to others.
Yes, we are still the biggest boy on the block, really the biggest boy in the world. We can beat up absolutely anybody who threatens us -- in fact they don’t dare to threaten us. We spend 440 billion dollars on weapons. We spend as much on weapons to defend ourselves as the rest of the world combined. Or, world spending -- that is all the countries in the whole wide world, is only twice the amount we spend. Or half of what is spent on weapons is spent by us -- or what we spend equals all of what all the others spend.
Of course we don’t feel threatened -- even if we are the guys who owe them money. They aren’t going to send somebody to lean on us if we don’t pay interest on our debt. Nobody is going to come & threaten us; we got more guns than all of them combined.
We shouldn’t be scared of them, but we need to be worried. We can’t spend & spend & spend. Someday they will decide to stop lending us money. Yes, they are scared of us, but fear won’t make them lend us money, and unless we decide to act like biggest bullies in the history of mankind -- unless we decide that the way to get rid of our debt is to kill all of them -- our debt will make us poor, and we will live all our lives as a debtor nation, working harder & harder to just pay the interest on our debt. So long
Copyright © 2007 Henry Morgenstein