by James Glaser
June 4, 2003

Now that President Bush has us on an ever lasting war footing, our priorities will have to change. There will be less and less money for education, job training, law enforcement, veterans benefits, and protecting the environment. Today we are spending more on the military and National Security functions at the Department of Energy than we do for all of these other federal agencies.

I can never understand why the costs for veterans benefits are not part of the budget of the Department of Defense. Without the Defense Department there wouldn't be any veterans. Now that would be a money saver.

Right now we are spending over 400 billion on defense and George Bush would like that to be 500 billion. If we add a hundred billion to defense it would seem to me, that we would lose a hundred billion someplace else, but maybe not. You see, George Bush likes to spend and like a lot of people that like to spend, he borrows to do it.

Congress just gave George 984 billion to spend. No, they didn't have the money, they just raised the "debt ceiling" and our government will issue bonds and pay interest on that money, so George can have his shopping spree. That is also why he was able to cut taxes for the rich and don't even think about telling me that poor working people will save money too, because that is not true.

George's spending is getting out of hand. Today we spend more on ways to kill people than the other eighteen countries that are in NATO, plus China and Russia. That is not all, you can add the six remaining rogue states to that list and we still spend more than all of them combined. This information comes from Senator Robert Byrd, who was the only Senator to vote against this spending of our future, on the military.

We can now say without a doubt that the United States of America spends more on our military than any other country does on theirs and that we have become the best in the history of the world on killing people. Hitler, not even close. Stalin, a piker and Paul Pot a rank amateur.

What is so important to note is that we can kill thousands while losing a handful of our own men and sometimes we lose none. That has never happened in the history of warfare. All we have to do is spend enough money on our high tech killing machines and we will remain on top.

I believe that is why we have terrorism. Nobody can even think about attacking us from another country with conventional weapons as we would destroy their homeland. So what can you do to hurt and slow down the Unites States? Why you can hire nut cases to commit suicide and hope they will take some of us with them. Low cost and some of these people are not crazy, but people with absolutely no future and for less than the cost of training one American soldier, you can buy a third world persons life by giving his family enough money so they will have some sort of a future.

Think about this. There are billions of people that make less than a dollar a day. If you gave a family that was earning that much money, 50,000 dollars in a lump sum, they would be set for life. The family member that gives his life in payment, would have had to work every day for a hundred and thirty six years to make that much.

Yes, people that hate or fear America can buy people for less than that, intelligent people that realize without their sacrifice, their loved ones will live their whole lives, suffering.

There is some truth that many people hate us for what we have, but killing someone because they have more than you do, is not the norm. If it was, there would be a bloodbath right here at home. But here, from almost the day you are born you are taught anyone in America can get rich if they work hard. That isn't true, as millions of Americans work like dogs and just get by. We do however have that hope or dream of making it big. In third world countries there is no hope and most dreams are nightmares.

So lets go back to George and his military spending. We will be able to keep this up for some time yet. For sure until the next election. This spending on the Military is going to catch up with us though. We spend this much because we live in fear of other countries attacking us. Think about how many international wars there have been in the last fifty years that we were not involved in. Not civil wars, but one Nation attacking another. Not many

Sad to say, our country kills people so that we can get our way. We kill people so that we can test our new ways of killing people. And yes, we kill people so that we can take what they have or force them to buy what we sell. Then we sit back and wonder why we need a military that dwarfs all others.

Most nations spend a fraction of what we do and why is that? What are we doing to other countries that makes us think they will want to attack us? Our government and our corporations do many things over seas that we know nothing about. If they are fearful of the rest of the world, it makes me wonder what we are doing out there.