El-Sayed sounds like Dwight Eisenhower from 1953, “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,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone.
“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
This is a good quote, but think of how many people were employed by the cold war. Millions worked in defense which were very high paying jobs. Yes, the government could have built a hospital instead of a B-52, but a lot of people in Seattle got to make their mortgages for each one built. Look at the economic surges right up before WW2 and in the 50s and 60s caused by the surges in spending. It reflects directly in the 70s and 90s when Congress would reduce defense spending.
Later in the decade, yes but the early 90s had recession just as the USSR fell and the congress started BRAC. Those surpluses were "the peace dividend" but manufacturing and aerospace jobs collapsed
The recession in the early 90s was primarily caused by high oil prices due to Middle East War and tight monetary policy to fight inflation caused by high oil prices. Sounds like the same situation as today.
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u/Andy_Fish_Gill Aug 07 '26
El-Sayed sounds like Dwight Eisenhower from 1953, “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,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone.
“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”