Nick Kristof On The Military Taboo

Austerity is the new black these days. We here about how we need to sacrifice (us, not the rich) but this usually involves taking our social security (even though it doesn’t contribute to the deficit). One part of our budget is hardly mentioned – the military budget. The New York Times‘s Nick Kristof takes on the taboo:

It’s the military/security world, and it’s time to bust that taboo. A few facts:

• The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.

• The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?

• The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.

• The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.

If we’re going to deal with the deficit, we can’t ignore one of the biggest contributors – our military-industrial complex. Unlike middle class workers, military contractors spend billions on lobbyists and have good friends in both parties.