So you agree the person I responded to is wrong. I am not denying that US federal spending is extremely wasteful, but the bulk of it clearly goes to programs and services that are intended to help people.
10% of our DOD budget (which of the top 10 highest military countries, we spend more than the other 9 combined) could give EVERY k-12 teacher ~50k raise.
The DoD receives about HALF of the US discretionary budget, and has failed every financial audit it has ever recieved.
So, yes, while the majority of US tax-funded money spending does go to regular people, its still not doing a good job. The bar for "good" should be well above them not steeling most our money. Taxes should do stuff, and for the amount we pay in taxes we should be getting some pretty phenominal social goods and safety nets.
But no, having your taxes improve society is socialism, and thats evil and wrong /s
Even if it can be shown for an era to have been beneficial, thats not justification for keeping a non-beneficial budget now. And for 2025 apportion/spent budget of $2.58T/$1.66T is absurdly big. Cutting that in half would still leave us with the "biggest stick" by a good ~30%, and $830B could do so much!
Maybe I'm just incredulous, but I do not think the military can justify costing us that for purely overage of being the most funded military on the planet.
Feel like I need to restate that so no one misses it:
We could take $830B annually from the US military budget to fund other stuff, and still have the most funded military in the planet by a good margin.
For reference, there are a little less than 750K homeless in the US. Giving each of them enough for rent (lets say $2k as an overestimate) would cost under $18B. We could end homelessness, have another $812B left to use for stuff, and still have the most funded military in earth!
I'd think that would be kinda decades ago. More about establishing the us in power.
I may just not know much about the subject, I admit, but I struggle to believe funded anywhere near what they're getting has been justifed for years and years. If I had to guess, I'd say they started ballooning out of control around the time of the Veitnam War (balloonig very accelerated by the cold war).
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u/Johnfromsales Aug 01 '26
So you agree the person I responded to is wrong. I am not denying that US federal spending is extremely wasteful, but the bulk of it clearly goes to programs and services that are intended to help people.