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Switch to Forum Live View The Iron Cross
12 months ago  ::  Jun 09, 2012 - 11:32AM #1
catboxer
catboxer
Posts: 12,237
In 1953, during his first year in the White House, President Eisenhower spoke to the American Society of Newspaper Editors about the costs of war. I thought of this speech this morning as I was reading an Associated Press story about the Pentagon's plans to build a new "stealth" warship equipped with exotic science-fiction weapons such as an electromagnetic "railgun" and a host of automated systems. The price tag? Three billion dollars per ship!

Eisenhower said:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Let's see; how many elementary schools could we build for three billion dollars? How long would such an amount fund an expanded food stamps program?

Some call it "defense spending," but as far as I'm concerned it's just good old piracy on the high seas.
Adepto vestri stercore simul.
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12 months ago  ::  Jun 09, 2012 - 12:01PM #2
Unworthyone
Unworthyone
Posts: 1,644

You just don't get it, Cat.  We need to cut funding to schools, firefighters, healthcare, and infrastructure, so that more big guns are affordable.  After all, it is all those school teachers police officers that are bankrupting this country, not the Pentagon.  Teachers and police are an expense to the taxpayers with no return on the investment.  Same thing with publically funded hospitals.  They provide nothing of value.


But the military?  They protect our overseas investments and vital interests.  They keep the oil flowing.  They keep overseas factories open.  They protect the shipping lanes so that all the products we manufacture overseas make it to our customers.  That's a valuable service, and as long as the taxpayers are willing to foot the bill, who's to say its not a good thing?

I never consider a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.  Thomas Jefferson

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein

You can get anything you want out of life if you will just help enough other people get what they want. Zig Ziglar

Here's the difference between a capitalist society and a communist society:  Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's the other way around.
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12 months ago  ::  Jun 09, 2012 - 8:44PM #3
REteach
REteach
Posts: 13,195

It doesn't even matter whether the military wants that stuff or not.  What really matters is bringing money to congressional districts so they will be re-elected.  Re-election trumps public good every time.  

I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize what you heard was not what I meant...
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12 months ago  ::  Jun 11, 2012 - 3:20PM #4
Druac
Druac
Posts: 7,657

Let me guess...it will run on oil and we will use it to protect OUR oil "over there".

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Jesus Is My Savior...He Saves Me From REALITY
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