10 Right Wing Economic Misconceptions
Defense Spending
What the Right believes: Defense spending is high because America has the best military in the world. Spending more on defense means better security and a safer America.
The Truth is: Exuberance and waste plague Pentagon and State Department spending. When it comes to government waste, the Pentagon is undisputed king. Since 1996 when Congress began auditing the Pentagon over $8.5 trillion has been unaccounted for. That’s an enormous sum of money. To put it in context, that’s enough to run the entire bloated federal government for over 2 years! Meanwhile at the State Department, audits have found billions of dollars in waste in Iraq. The State Department also threw away $80 million to secure a site for the US’s diplomatic operations hub, only to change their minds and walk away. It doesn’t end there, lavish embassies and expenditures for unnecessary layers of bureaucrats drain money from taxpayers. The 9/11 Commission even cited complex bureaucracies as a reason for intelligence failures that lead to the attacks carried out in New York and Washington, DC. What that means is our defense systems are so bloated with unnecessary bureaucracies that the very agencies tasked with protecting us have become weighed down and less effective. As a result basic communication between agencies becomes a complex undertaking.
The US Spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. Unfortunately, a considerable amount of that is wasteful. The US must cut military spending if it is going to stop the waste, but something the Right continually fights against.
Does Spending on Military Makes us Safer
[youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW84Z2Am_Kk[/youtube]
