As you know our economy is headed towards basketcase status, but there is a simple solution to saving our economy and it doesn’t involve a single tax increase to anyone in the United States. However, those who believe war heals all wounds and is a preventative cure all will not like this solution because quite simply the most effective way to save the economy is to drastically reduce defense spending. The way I see it we could reduce our annual defense spending by about 500 billion. We’d still be spending about 200 billion annually on defense expenditures, but we’d still be spending more than three times as much money per year on defense than our leading competitors, and we’d still outspend them if they all combined against us.
2 France 61,571,330,000
3 United Kingdom 61,280,890,000
4 People’s Republic of China 61,036,400,000
For what its worth out of the second, third, and fourth ranked nations in yearly military spending (we are in first place at over 700 billion) only China could be deemed as a threat to our national security and they have an annual budget of a little more than 61 billion. You wanna toss in the big bad Russkies, they must be bad because I saw Red Dawn the other day, and you get another 50 billion per year. China and Russia together (arguably our biggest rivals) spend 111 billion a year on defense. Somewhere out there at least one hawk is thinking about the doomsday scenario of what would happen if the Peoples’ Republic of China and the Russian Federation linked up with the two remaining members of the fantastical Axis of Evil. As far as spending goes this would not be a problem as Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea combined only spend 112 billion combined. Iran, alone, spends six billion a year on military expenditures, and I have to say that I have to agree with John McCain a nation that spends that little on military expenses has got to be “an exististional threat to the United States.” The other member of Axis of Evil, North Korea, spends 5.5 billion dollars.
Of course the member nations of the Axis of Evil may be looking for new members since uber evil and overwhelmingly powerful Iraq (you know the ones who were going to take out Israel, Kuwait and make Europe into a Caliphate before they marched through Downtown Manhattan, but who oddly enough were completely occupied in less than four weeks) was squashed. So lets say, for hypothetical purposes, that the Axis of Evil in its usual comic book style knights Cuba and Venezuela as evil enough for membership. Lets say for a moment that both Cuba and Venezuela (two nations with governments we don’t like so surely thats recipricol and not just empty rhetoric spewed from those in the military industrial lobbyists on K-Street) should combine their spending power with the traditional boogey men countries of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. First lets examine Cuba, this tropical gulag is led by Castro who has to be the worst man alive considering the millions of man hours the CIA has invested, along with a billion or so dollars, over the years to kill him. Cuba spends 694 million per anum on defense. The other Latin candidate for the Axis of Evil is Venezuela. Chavez spends 4 billion per year on defense. Our biggest threats, as far as nation states go, spend a combined 127 billion a year. Which means that we could cut our spending by more than 500 billion and still nearly spend twice the amount of money a year on defense that they spend combined.
Oh sure, this would mean less foreign adventures such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. No cool quagmires or humanitarian disasters, not as many new toys either. We’d have to cancel our antagonistic manhood measuring contest, aka our missile defense shield, in Poland and the Czech Republic. We’d have to leave the Balkans, we’d have to stop training the Georgians on how to commit genocide and blame the Russians for it, but we’d still be able to have a well equipped Army, Air Force, and Navy. Naturally, we would have to quit the cowboy diplomacy of the past eight years with actual diplomacy and we could do this and still have a defense budget that is more than three times larger than that of our nearest competitor. We’d still be able to respond to threats and while we wouldn’t be able to do away with the yearly income tax we could give every single American tax payer a stimulus check for the amount of 2500 dollars.
So to reiterate, all we would have to do would be to cut defense spending from 700 billion to 200 billion (a slash of 500 billion) per year and we could either take that money and save social security, have universal healthcare, build new energy and transportation infrastructure, build and fund more schools and universities, or just simply give every American tax payer (all two hundred million) a 2500 dollar stimulus check.
All info regarding spending numbers was retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of…y_expenditures
