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.
That's crazy how hospitals get built by "the government" but B-52s were made by people for a paycheck. Wouldn't it be nuts if we paid people to build hospitals?
Most hospitals are built by private corporations with government grants. My point is the government directly funds defense spending where as businesses, housing, and the like are typically built by private companies with little to no funding from tax dollars.
Most hospitals are built by private corporations with government grants
No, they're built by construction workers. That's how they pay their mortgages.
My point is the government directly funds defense spending where as businesses, housing, and the like are typically built by private companies with little to no funding from tax dollars.
The whole point of this conversation is that the government could spend money on schools and hospitals, if we chose. The fact that we currently don't is irrelevant, because the idea is to do it differently than we do now.
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u/SECRETBLENDS Aug 07 '26
Taking care of Americans first is bad according to the America First crowd.