Reduce Military Spending

At an eye-popping $753 BILLION, President Biden’s just-released FY2022 Pentagon budget is an increase on even Trump’s highest levels. Here are just five (of many) examples of gross misspending at the Pentagon and ideas for how to reinvest that money to actually help our communities.

1. $1.727 trillion spent on a faulty fighter jet is enough for 20 million public housing units for a decade.
2. $1.7 trillion for nuclear weapons over the course of 30 years could pay for 700,000 clean energy jobs for the same period.
3. $125 billion in past bureaucratic waste could have bought 3.2 billion Covid-19 vaccines. (Don’t forget that the Pentagon has never passed an audit!)
4. The top 5 weapons contractors raked in $150 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2020. That could have meant 10 years of wind power for 25 million households.
5. Just one-third of the $204.6 billion in U.S. security assistance from 2006-2016 (an amount that likely went to human rights abusers), would have paid for the healthcare of 1.9 million low-income adults for the same period.

These are the trade-offs made in our names every year. From these egregious cases of waste, one thing is clear: we’ve got to end the greedy corruption at the core of Pentagon budgets.

It is a tautology, that people who support greater military strength, compared to those who support freedom via other means, and want to defund any military, are hateful, faithless, fearmongers. If you don’t like these labels, provide some others you would prefer, because no matter what you call it, it is still the same thing, compared to those who want to defund military spending/operations.