Here’s something quick with a chart and a Vermont connection.
In an editorial Monday titled: A Better not Fatter Defense Budget the NYTimes.com suggested the time has come to take a look at throttling back US military spending. And one of the most expensive aircraft ever, the F-35 (scheduled to be based in Burlington VT 2019)caught their eye.
The Pentagon can do with far fewer than the 1,700 F-35s it plans on buying.
[…]For nearly a decade after 9/11, the Pentagon had a virtual blank check; the base defense budget rose, in adjusted dollars, from $378 billion in 1998 to $600 billion in 2010. As the military fought Al Qaeda and the Taliban, billions of dollars were squandered on unnecessary items, including new weapons that ran late and over budget like the troubled F-35 jet fighter.
If the founding fathers hated any one thing, it was a standing army. Ok, maybe Hamilton had a bit of a predilection for uniforms. 99% of them, however, thought that a standing army was an instrument of tyranny, a sink of corruption, and a temptation towards foreign wars. Ridiculous, right?
If those men could be brought forward in a time machine I imagine they would look at the military budget and the scope of our international military stance and say, “Why did we bother? We put our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor on the line for this? An army with a nation attached to it like a dog’s tail? We’re going to go back, surrender, and be loyal British subjects. At least with a monarchy there’s no pretense.”
And you have to wonder if Republicans are in denial of math as well as science.
To the Party of Trump, our military is “weak” and “decimated.” They can’t wait to get into the White House to “make it strong again.” One of their principle complaints about Obama is that he has weakened the military.
They’re so busy trying to take away “entitlements” like Social Security, Medicaid, and public education in order to cut the budget, but are completely blind to the biggest money hole in the federal purse.