The White House sent this e-mail where one could vote to determine the best idea for saving money the Federal Government spent.
The options were:
Post Public Notice for Seized Property Online, Not in Newspapers.
End the Mailing of Thousands of Federal Registers to Employees.
Stop the Express Delivery of Empty Containers.
Require Mine Operators to Report Online.
All of these are nickel and dime stuff; while I think this is very admirable and eventually would save millions of dollars it amounts to peanuts as compared to what we spend on the military. The real significant expenditures lie with the military and with giving out contracts to all these outfits that have proven to be less than ethical and in the past have even been fined for overbilling and just plain stealing money from the government.
The United States spends 623 billion, more than every other nation combined. And many of those nations are our allies. Is it really necessary for our national defense that we spend more than the combined total of all other nations on earth?
Which countries are our likely foes in some future hypothetical conflict? Russia 50 billion, China 65 billion, North Korea 5 billion, Iran 4.3 billion, let's add Venezuela 1.6 billion to make the right wingers happy. That's a combined total of 126 billion dollars. America alone spends 5 times the amount of those 5 countries combined military expenditures.*
Is it necessary for us to spend billions of dollars defending Japan, Korea, and Germany when they are now big boys and can assume responsibility for their own defense? Do we really need so many military bases around the globe?
So, when the Teahadist-Republicans speak of the deficit and that the government is spending too much, that it is too big, are they really thinking of the military or is that their sacred cow?
Also, the way wars are fought in the present world it is not necessary to have the largest aircraft carrier or the latest stealth aircraft. Those are but vestiges of the cold war and we have to fight different now. Terrorism requires intelligence and surveillance, it requires a war of ideas and we have to redirect our objectives, re-think our goals and trim our military so we can afford to make the necessary changes to fight terrorism.
Lastly, if just a dozen nuclear devices are sufficient to render the whole planet uninhabitable for the next thousand years, why is it then that we have thousands upon thousands of nuclear weapons?
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.dmzhawaii.org/
