Destroying our country, Soviet style

[MadHound]

Once again we are watching the spectacle of an empire collapsing due to overspending on their military. As people here at home suffer, the President continues to prosecute two illegal, immoral wars that are unpopular here at home.

As our infrastructure crumbles, as our people suffer from high unemployment, foreclosure, skyrocketing health care costs and a host of other problems, the military budget continues to rise in this country.

Meanwhile, after a brief upturn in world public opinion due to simply being "NotBush", Obama has proven to the world that he is just as much a warmonger as his predecessor, doubling down not once, but twice in Afghanistan, and expanding the war to another sovereign country, Pakistan.

Now after promising a firm date, the Obama administration is hedging its bets when talking about pulling out of Iraq, and the war in Afghanistan has no end on the horizon.

While millions of people make the tough choices between food and shelter, lights or medicine, a few at the top of the MIC foodchain continue to make obscene amount of money as more and more wealth is transferred from the lower classes to the rich, with the aid of a government who taxes people for wars that we have no business prosecuting.

This is much the way that the Soviet Union went down, it spent too much on the military and too little on its own people. We are headed in the same direction at a rapid rate. We have plenty of money to spend on drones, but our education system is going down the tubes. The same with our roads and bridges, our social safety net, virtually any domestic program in this country.

Is this how we want our country to collapse? Are we going to continue to cheer on these wars, while our country collapses about us, simply because the warmonger in chief has a D after his name?

These wars weren't right when Bush was running them and having Obama in office doesn't make them any more right. We are still killing innocent men, women and children for no good reason in a war that we simply cannot win.

So what are we going to do? Are we simply going to sit back and cheer while our country goes down the drain? Or will we force the Obama administration to end these wars, bring the troops home and start looking after our country first? The decision is up to us, war and collapse, or peace and prosperity.

Think about it.

[invictus]

1. K&R

[lonestarnot]

2. K & R

[mmonk]

3. Correct. Recommended.

[Echo In Light]

4. K&R

[formercia]

5. K&R

Someone needs to say it.

[proudohioan]

6. We plan on attending the March 20th rally in DC.

Don't know if it will do any good, but at some point, we gotta get up off our asses and try something!

[mmonk]

8. Great idea.

[proudohioan]

9. Thanks. We'll see how well it goes over. n/t

[Echo In Light]

10. +1

[City Lights]

7. K&R. nt

[Captain Hilts]

11. No, not really. nt

[MadHound]

12. Really?

You deny the evidence that is plain in front of you? Why?

[Captain Hilts]

13. Because I've spent years studying the Soviet, now Russian, economy. nt

[MadHound]

14. So despite the record, despite the research done by many economists,

Despite the admission of Russian leaders themselves, you don't think that the Soviet Union went down due to overspending on the military.

Thanks, but I think I'll stick to the opinions of experts rather than that of an anonymous internet poster.

Just one little figure for you, at the end there the Soviet Union was spending 17 percent of its GDP on the military, a figure that most sane economists agree is entirely unsustainable.

[Captain Hilts]

16. I didn't say they did not collapse because of over-spending on the military. That is true. But

it's more complicated than that.

It's the effort to defeat nature and establish entire communities and industries where they could not possibly be economically self-sustaining.

It was the effort to reroute the country's rivers.

It was the effort to establish agriculture where things will not grow.

It was an economy and government that was completely dependent on cronyism.

It was an economy that rewarded free riders and provided too many incentives to work poorly.

Etc...

The US economy and political system both have large margins for error the Soviet system could only dream about.

[MadHound]

17. Large margins for error? Have you taken a look at our debt lately?

We're well over 12 trillion dollars in debt. Our debt is quickly approaching our GDP in size. It is a huge economic headwind that is pushing us back, not allowing us to go forward.

Meanwhile, with true unemployment approaching twenty percent, with our infrastructure crumbling, with our education system being driven into the ground, with our health care system bankrupting millions, our debt simply holds back our ability to do anything significant to address these problems because the largest amount of discretionary spending in the government budget has been sucked up by the military. Official spending figures for the military budget puts it at 26%, but if you add in all the black box operations, all the items that get shoved into other budgets(example, our nuclear fleet is listed as part of the DOE, not DOD) our true military spending is up around half of our total budget. This is simply outrageous.

No, we're not establishing economically unsustainable cities, we're not diverting rivers (oh, wait, we are), we're not dependent on cronyism (oh, wait, what about lobbyists and other crony capitalists), we don't have free riders (except for our corporations and the elite in this country), but we have our own separate set of problems that are dragging us down. The biggest of them is the military. We are spending 28 times more on our military than the next twenty countries combined. You don't think that we could, we should cut that number, say in half?

Our margin for error is really quite slim, and if we continue to spend on the military like we are currently doing, we're screwed.

[raccoon]

15. K&R. nt

[indepat]

18. I've thought about it and can readily refute the following:.... Got that?

:P