Budget Deficits & Our National Priorities

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As our legislators fight over the deficit and some look at the increasing costs of providing health care to the poor and elderly, we should be taking a look at the enormous wasted resources we allocate to fight wars and maintain our military bases all over the world. I think we have our priorities mixed up. Our national security is not enhanced by maintaining large expensive military bases in Korea, Japan, Germany and a half dozen other countries.

The wars that left us holding the bag in those countries have been over for decades. It is high time to bring those troops home, close those bases and save the billions of dollars that we desperately need to repair our infrastructure, reduce our dependence upon foreign oil and to provide quality health care. And we can use the savings to help balance the budget and trim the debt.

Why don’t we look at defense spending with a critical eye? Why are we fighting three wars that seemingly have no end? Two of these wars that have been fought for over a decade and have costs that are reaching over a trillion dollars. I do not know why we are still fighting in Iraq, I do not know why we are still fighting in Afghanistan, and regardless of what the President says, we are fighting another war in Libya that has no end in sight.

Why can’t we do what Vermont’s late Senator Aiken said during the Vietnam war—“just declare victory and bring the troops home”?

While deficit hawks look everywhere for places to cut, defense spending always seems to be off-limits. Some of that is due to the widespread impact of what President Eisenhower first warned is a growing military-industrial complex. This means that every state and every district has defense contractors, military bases or other connections that make it seemingly politically impossible to make steep cuts in our defense budget to help balance the overall budget.

I am not an isolationist by any means, but I do not know what we are doing building up others’ infrastructures, schools, bridges and roads when we have so many critical needs in our own country.

We need to get our priorities in line with our needs and expectations. We have cities to rebuild, renewable energy development to support, a critical health care disaster looming and we are wasting our resources on misguided, ongoing wars.

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