by James Glaser
June 11, 2002

That is right folks, we, the US of A, spend $589,802.00 every minute of every day on national defense. I found that hard to believe too and got out the calculator to do some checking. That comes out to $9830.00 each and every second, but that is a mere 849 million, plus some change, per day. This is a figure put out last year and now George has us over the $1,000,000,000.00 per day in spending. Makes you feel safe huh?

Oh, by the way this does not include any special moneys put out for Homeland Defense nor special funds spent on the September 11 attack. Now you know why Congress doesn't talk about that "Lock Box" any more. Can you just imagine how Osama and his boys are chuckling at our response to their attack?

Have you ever wondered how George got us over the billion a day plateau? Well he came up with this never ending war on terrorism. Last year there were terrorists and they were a problem to deal with. Sunday, Tom Ridge the head of Homeland Security was on the morning political talk show circuit and said that this War on Terrorism would never end. That is why we need this spending.

If you admit that a war will never end, are you admitting that you will never win that war? Now does that follow that if you can't win, you can't negotiate for a peace? By the way, do any of you know what the terrorists are demanding we do to get them to quit? Maybe that is another one of those secrets that Washington doesn't think we should know because of National Security.

I think by now every citizen knows that we spend the most in the world on defense, more that the next nine highest nations combined. Why? What are we doing that we feel this afraid of the world? Has America become paranoid or are there that many people in power making money off defense?

Congress only has so much money that it can spend on the needs of our nation. You are right, most of the discretionary spending does go to defense. Now can any of you imagine what better uses our nation could find for all that money if the world wasn't out to get us?