I would argue that a military junta has taken hold of power in Washington, and nobody noticed. CEOs are paid a lot of money because they are in charge, not so? If that holds in Washington, might that tell us who is really in charge? Who gets most of our tax dollars? The Pentagon, by a considerable margin. One has to do a proper analysis to see through the fog of war.
USA Spending.gov has some revealing statistics. The website gives a breakdown of the Fiscal Year 2019 Spending by Budget Function ($6.9 trillion). National Defense ($1.1 trillion – not a typo) and Veterans ($217.6 billion) absorb a tidy $1.318 trillion. Apart from Health ($729.7 billion – not Medicare spending), interest on the debt ($587.1 billion) is the next largest item of expenditure, other than Social Security ($1.2 trillion) and Medicare ($1.2 trillion). For the purpose of this analysis, I attribute $165 billion (28% of total) of the interest expense to the Pentagon. We did borrow money from the Chinese to help pay for the trillions of dollars we spent on chasing goat herders* in the desert. The total tax dollars of $1.483 trillion for defense equate to one-third of the $4.5 trillion spent in fiscal 2019.
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This number excludes spending on Social Security and Medicare. The Form W-2 indicates quite clearly that our payroll taxes, as a separate category of taxes, go towards these mandatory outlays. Hence, with these mandatory outlays excluded from the total amount of $6.9 trillion, our government spent $4.5 trillion in FY 2019. (In the past decade, after-tax corporate profits have totaled about $16.5 trillion, while federal debt has increased by about $9.4 trillion.)
It is not presumptuous to assert that if a third of our taxes go the Pentagon, the generals are in charge, and that describes a military junta, albeit one could argue a “benevolent” junta of sorts. More so, if we accept the truism that there is no risk of an invasion and subsequent subjugation of our homeland by any foreign power. This level of expenditures is devoid of reality. Our democracy has been hijacked in front of our very eyes.
* Talking about chasing goat herders ill-equipped to take on a superpower. Thankfully, relatively few US soldiers have died on the battlefield. However, since 1999, 128,940 veterans have committed suicide at a rate of 17 per day. “By 2012, some 663,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were classified as having partial or complete service-connected disabilities – that’s one in every four of the 2.3 million who served in those wars.” They Were Soldiers – how the wounded return from America’s wars – the untold story, (p. 111), Ann Jones.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.
