hahaha yea its the defense budget that is bankrupting the nation.
Actually the defense budget, with its sacred cows, is a part of the problem. With the amount of pork and extraneous fat in there our representatives owe it to us and to the country to go over the DoD budget with a fine tooth comb and come back with leaner numbers. But that's the case with just about every other part of the budget anyways. And it's their
duty to see that every single fucking cent taken from us and spent on our behalf is well spent, because we busted our asses working hard to earn all those cents.
To be clear, I am not one to advocate cutting military spending by any fixed percent - such proclamations are as dumb as they are naive - but the need to trim the budget is practically self-evident and considering spending cuts is the sensible thing to do. The logic is simple: If our debt is a national security issue (which has been a big conservative talking point in this election cycle) then working to reduce the national debt ipso facto strengthens us. In order to achieve that we need to get over this notion that we have that military spending is sancrosanct, never to be touched unless touching is defined to mean "here's more money." That notion is
bullshit.
I'll give you a good example, in addition to what irongrip400 posted above: I just did a quick Google search and
this is the first thing that came up: The Department of Defense supposedly pissed away
nearly $750,000,000 in late fees on rented shipping containers by not returning them on time. Perhaps there's a good reason - moving containers out of warzones may be prohibitevely expensive, perhaps even impossible. But when you consider that an average shipping container can be bought for less than $10,000 the fact is that for a much smaller amount the Pentagon could have outright just
BOUGHT 75,000 containers and still have money left over! And this isn't an isolated incident of wasteful spending; there's a ton of other examples, some similar, some not. But this one, single waste of the money you worked hard for should make you take a step back and wonder "
WHAT. THE. FUCK!?!?"
Wasteful spending, whether it's in the "defense budget" or the "welfare budget" is wasteful spending, it is bankrupting the nation, and it must be eliminated whenever and wherever it's found.