Why not cut war spending instead of social spending?

Unlike Social spending, the Constitution says we have to spend money on the military, it says nothing about social programs.

It may be a small piece of the pie, but it would make a positive change in America. Seeing the country spend the money at home instead of abroad would strengthen the perceived concern the government has for it's own people. Take that 50% and spend it on domestic issues instead. 1/2 of 1% of our federal budget on domestic programs is a heck of a lot of money that we aren't spending at home now.

Keep your bullshit straw man arguments to yourself. I did not at any time say anything remotely resembleing this horseshit: "whatever law Congress makes is what General Welfare means"--your argument is so feeble and your attempts at logic so desparate that you have to make up things now.

You are happy with militarism, but not what you see as socialism. Tough ****.

Brandon9000 wrote:

Then it's your assertion that there are no current or potential military or security dangers in the world worth spending money on - no national interests worth defending?

You are making a false dilemma by insisting that those who criticize the inordinate war spending by the USA are calling for the USA to spend nothing. That is certainly an easier position to knock down than to deal with the actual position (that the USA spends inordinately on war and should cut there instead of social spending) but it would be more intellectually honest not to construct such a straw man and actually deal with the arguments with a bit of integrity.

A claim that there is no threat that justifies US levels of war spending does not mean there are no threats to justify any level of spending. That is just your way of making opposing positions more amenable to your capacity to argue against them.

malice and oil...

The primary goal and effect of the defense budget is to protect you, not to "kill a bunch" of random people for no reason except malice.

Clark: Our foreign policy has been a disaster since long before that planning guide — for a lot longer than we'd like to believe. We can look all the way back to the arrogance of the Monroe Doctrine, when the United States said, "This hemisphere is ours," ignoring all the other people who lived here, too. For a part of this past century, there were some constraints on our capacity for arbitrary military action — what you might call the inhibitions of the Cold War — but with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we've acquired a headier sense of what we can get away with.

Our overriding purpose, from the beginning right through to the present day, has been world domination — that is, to build and maintain the capacity to coerce everybody else on the planet: nonviolently, if possible; and violently, if necessary. But the purpose of our foreign policy of domination is not just to make the rest of the world jump through hoops; the purpose is to facilitate our exploitation of resources. And insofar as any people or states get in the way of our domination, they must be eliminated — or, at the very least, shown the error of their ways.

I'm not talking about just military domination. U.S. trade policies are driven by the exploitation of poor people the world over. Vietnam is a good example of both the military and the economic inhumanity. We have punished its government and people mercilessly, just because they want freedom. The Vietnamese people had to fight for thirty years to achieve freedom — first against the French, and then against the United States. I used to be criticized for saying that the Vietnamese suffered 2 million casualties, but I've noticed that people now say 3 million without much criticism. Yet that war was nothing compared to the effects of twenty years of sanctions, from 1975 to 1995, which brought the Vietnamese people — a people who had proven to be invincible when threatened by physical force on their own land — down to such dire poverty that they were taking to open boats in stormy seas, and drowning, to get to a refugee camp in Hong Kong, a place no one in his or her right mind would want to be. They went simply because they saw no future in their own country.

I went to North Vietnam in the summer of 1971, when the U.S. was trying to destroy civilian dikes through bombing. Our government figured that if it could destroy Vietnam's capacity for irrigation, it could starve the people into submission.

Quote:

The primary goal and effect of the defense budget is to protect you, not to "kill a bunch" of random people for no reason except malice.

That's absolute BS, Brandon.

Quote:

Clark: Our foreign ...

Then why did you say:

"It'd have the side effect of not killing a bunch of people?"

Above here you indicate it's just a question of waste, but when you opened the thread, you implied that this money is used to "kill a bunch of people" implying that this money is being used to kill people without justification.

When you opened the thread you made that argument, not the waste argument. The primary goal and effect of the defense budget is to protect you, not to "kill a bunch" of random people for no reason except malice.

Why not cut war spending instead of social spending?
It'd have the side effect of not killing a bunch of people as well and making America fewer enemies. Seems like a better idea to me.

Yes, it sounds good, but apparently it's bad and only suggested by people who hate the US, want her citizens to be weak slaves, don't understand real reality as opposed to delusional reality and hate freedom.
Oh, and commies and girly men.

But let's not forget it is not only the US which has made so many enemies, its obliging allies have as well. (Including my own country & quite a few others.)

What exactly is the point of all this expenditure for all this carnage?