I was reading about the Massive Ordinance Bombs with it’s $16 million dollar cost, and was thinking, “more wasteful government spending”. It comes after dropping about $50 million in Tomahawk bombs on Syria.
I though President Donald Trump was against government waste. $16 millions could replace a highway bridge in America, and $50 million could build a new school. With our country facing such large deficits, we should seriously be looking at every penny we spend, and looking how we can ramp down government spending, while becoming a fairer, more just and sustainable society.
I’m starting to think Donald Trump is the king of government waste. He by no means lives frugally, instead preferring to take a jet trip down to Florida every week, and maintaining secret service protection both in the White House and at his Condo in New York. Yet, he should be setting the model for cutting waste out of government. He has not proposed to cut wasteful military programs, or take commonsense measures that could save billions but only marginally increase the risk for the vast majority of Americans.
One of the most difficult to cost but costly services in society is our military, and their paramilitary equivalent at local, state and federal level — our first responders. Yes, we all want to have police to come when we are victimized by crime, when we get into an accident, we want the ambulance to come and when our house is on fire, the firefighters to come. We don’t want terrorists and foreign nations invading our country. That’s a given. But they all need to economize too.
For too long, our country has not asked the military to economize. As the world’s superpower, do we really need more bombs? We had plenty of killing technology during World War II. Why do we need more? We’ve not asked our police forces to work with fewer officers and older cars. Firearms that are well maintained rarely need replacement. We’ve not asked fire departments to hold onto their trucks longer, and for ambulance drivers to use older, less effective rescue equipment. Engines can be rebuild and rust can be patched to get more years out of equipment. But maybe it’s time to ask all of government to economize — especially when government spending is so out of control.
It’s great that we save so many lives — but if we could save somewhat fewer lives — we could save taxpayers lot of money. Less military, less police, less firefighters and less emergency medical professionals means lower taxes. Getting more use of existing but somewhat worn-out equipment means lower taxes. We could live with slightly more terrorism and crime and slightly more fire destruction, without making life much different for most people. We could have a slightly more people die in car crashes due to delayed emergency responses — and save society billions. Safety is important, as is having a strong military, but it’s also important government economizes.
"The predictable passage of blank checks for war was an expression of the acceptability of the status quo. The status quo was murder, but within the halls of Congress and, of course, the White House, there was a level of comfort with that. From the US's early days, the military evolved largely as a vehicle for colonialism and genocide. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes in An Indigenous People's History of the United States, "the Iraq War was just another Indian war in the US military tradition." This country's military has long been more of an offensive force -- charging ahead with the winds of white supremacy and capitalism at its back -- than one of "defense." The Iraq War is one moment in its long legacy of actively disrupting, upending and devastating the lives and communities of millions of people of color, both at home and abroad."
"Much of the government seems to view perpetual war as an inevitability, the way most of us, in the words of Angela Davis, "take for granted" the existence of prisons. Davis has written that, although prisons as we know them are a fairly recent addition to the world, they have become so embedded in our society that "it is difficult to imagine life without them." The US's brand of imperialist militarism, too, is seen as natural. In the mid-2000s, many liberal Democrats were arguing for a strategy of amelioration: a small-scale withdrawal of troops, the cutting of some "waste" from the Pentagon budget, a halt to the production of a couple of bizarrely expensive fighter jets. These measures were aimed at mitigating the damage, instead of disrupting the overall project of war, militarism and the destruction of communities, most of them in Muslim-majority countries."
"Here’s how preparing your taxes could work: You sit down, review a prefilled filing from the government. If it’s accurate, you sign it. If it’s not, you fix it or ignore it altogether and prepare your return yourself. It’s your choice. You might not have to pay for an accountant, or fiddle for hours with complex software. It could all be over in minutes.
It’s already like that in parts of Europe. And it would not be particularly difficult to give U.S. taxpayers the same option. After all, the government already gets earnings information from employers.
But as ProPublica has detailed again and again, Intuit — the makers of TurboTax — and H&R Block have lobbied for years to derail any move toward such a system. And they continued in 2016."
