Opinion: US military spending is out of control

Hello, I’m Graham Elwood. And I want to talk to you about the out-of-control United States military budget. 

Every time we want something good: free healthcare like they’ve had in Western Europe for 70 years, student debt forgiveness, oh, how are we going to pay for it? How are we going to pay for it? 

That question is never, and I mean, never asked by anyone in the corporate media, when it comes to war. We outspend the next 11 countries combined. This is the total budget for 2021, $778 billion is more than 10, 11 countries combined, 761 total. 

We could cut our budget in half and still outspend China, the next closest country by $200 billion. 

This is why when you drive down the street and you see dilapidated parks, roads, schools, your kids’ school. Oh, they don’t have enough money for the band or the drama department or the science lab or the computer or the sports team while where we don’t, we never have the money. We never have the money. 

We always have the money for war and Eisenhower warned us about this when he left office in 1961.

Eisenhower: 

“We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations…. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”

Well, we don’t have that.  He was warning about this 60 years ago, and you think while your party is better than the other party, this is part of the problem. 

The two-party system is one of the elements of the military industrial complex. You don’t believe me.

Let’s just look at Afghanistan. Four presidents from both political parties spent $3.5 trillion over 20 years to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.  Only a Taliban that has now $80 billion of American weaponry that was left there. They run both parties. 

It’s a complete joke, but then there’s always a new bogeyman. Oh, but Graham, what about China?

Oh no, China’s the big evil enemy? Well, China is reacting to the fact that we have surrounded them with military bases. Can you imagine if there’s some Chinese bases in Canada, in central and south America, in the Gulf of Mexico, could you imagine how we would respond? If we allow this to happen. We’d go nuts and China, while not some big, nice Teddy bear has their own authoritarianism. 

Not as much as we have, by the way. 

They’re not going to invade us because it doesn’t make sense for China to invade a country with 330 million of its best customers. 

That’d be like Victoria Secret invading strip clubs. It doesn’t make any sense. 

So we need to pay close attention to this out of control, military budget. While we drive down our streets in America, and we see tent cities, we see people waiting in line for food because they lost their jobs during this pandemic. Schools, housing, all of it, all of that money. 

Take that $3.5 trillion we spent in Afghanistan. That was a waste that all could have gone for American citizens, and I’m a standup comedian that went to Afghanistan three times to entertain the military, and when I first went there in ’04 I thought we were doing something good. 

Turns out the only people that benefited from us being there for 20 years was the Taliban and the military industrial complex.  Enough is enough.