President Eisenhower was right when he 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.”
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many strategists suggested that the Cold War arms race had bankrupted its economy and caused its downfall. More than 20 years later, it appears that some in Washington are driving the U.S. toward a similar fate.
The Joint Strike Fighter (F-35) is now slated to cost the American taxpayer $1.5 trillion, with about a trillion attributable to its expensive maintenance costs
Adm. Michael Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has noted that “the most significant threat to our national security is our debt.”
Dollar-for-dollar, money invested in weapons produces fewer jobs than money invested in education, green jobs, or a myriad of other industries, according to a study by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
The cost of the current DoD weapons portfolio has grown by more than $447 billion from initial estimates.
John Griesgraber
Finley
