Arms contractors. Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson made $20 million last year. The company as a whole reported $5.8 billion in profits.
Arms contractors. Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson made $20 million last year. The company as a whole reported $5.8 billion in profits.
Yes, we actually just used one for the first time in 2018, on "a Taliban target in Afghanistan." Without meaning to sound flippant: do you feel like this event improved your life?
The annual cost now is "only" $11 billion, because you spend more at the beginning of a project like this (when you're designing the plane) than you do in the middle (when you just have to build new ones and maintain the rest). But the average cost per year for this project is $27 billion. If we could cancel the thing, we could talk about what to do with the saved $11 billion a year. But since the Pentagon believes that the project is too big to fail, we're left to consider a hypothetical case in which our society has saner priorities.
Yes, some, although if you want to go down that line of argument, there would also be massive financial benefits to many of the things suggested on this site. Even if your sole measure of a country's success is GDP (and it really shouldn't be, since GDP doesn't in any way reflect the wellbeing of the average citizen, but never mind that for now)... things like toxic water, widespread malnutrition, and chronic homelessness have obvious negative effects on the economy, besides the fact that they're unethical. These societal failures constitute a colossal waste of human potential, any way you choose to quantify it. In other words, we're paying a lot for things we're not doing.
If only! It's not that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans — there are some big ones — but when it comes to military spending, it feels like there's not a lot of daylight peeking through. 85 percent of Senate Democrats voted in favor of a $716 billion military spending bill for 2019 — an $82 billion increase over the 2018 budget, and more than the Trump administration had even requested. So even our representatives who are supposed to be on the left are perfectly happy to give a huge percentage of our resources to weapons contractors.
If you ask people to divide up a hypothetical budget and allot a percentage of their choice to the military, they generally put it at around half of what it actually is — allotting about 26% of federal discretionary spending, when it's actually about 53%. That's fairly bipartisan, by the way: even self-identified Republicans think it should be around 38%. It's weird that none of our elected representatives seem interested in representing that particular belief. Either they feel it's too risky to be perceived as "not supporting the troops," or the $127 million the weapons industry spends on lobbying every year is getting the job done. (The arms industry is also clever about spreading manufacturing across congressional districts, which makes it more politically costly for individual representatives to speak out against military spending.)
Something rather eloquent, in his 1953 "Chance for Peace" speech:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Because we all suffer from a cognitive bias towards the status quo. In other words, we act like the things that we're used to are normal and fine. That's why when someone talks about how all Americans should have health care, or how we should have a serious plan to fight global warming, "reasonable" "centrist" commentators and elected officials blanket the news with one question: "But how are we going to pay for that?" That's not to say we should never worry about how to fund things as a society! But the next time you hear "But how are we going to pay for that?" please remember the sorts of things we are already paying for, which do no good for anyone except weapons industry executives.
Great! Email it to me at pete at insteadofthef35 dot com and if I can find research to back it up, I'll add it to the site.
I'm listening! Please email me at pete at insteadofthef35 dot com.
Totally! Please email me at pete at insteadofthef35 dot com.