US war debts pile up
BACK in the 1950’s, a British professor at the distinguished University of Malaya, C. Northcote Parkinson, observed that as the postwar Royal Navy shrank in size, its bureaucracy continued to expand.
He formulated a law that bureaucracies will naturally grow at 5-7% a year. He said “Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich.”
All bureaucracies, public and private, must be periodically forced on a diet. US President Donald Trump is, as promised, taking an axe to Washington’s dense bureaucratic undergrowth. He claims the cuts will save US$2.5 trillion over 10 years.
On Trump’s black list are such donothing government institutions as the International Fund for Ireland (US$25 million); US Trade Development Agency (US$55 million); Community Development Fund (US$4.5 billion to buy black votes); funds for Federal office space (US$864 million a year, thank you Prof Parkinson); USDA sugar subsidy programme at US$14 million; US$900 million for administration for the cancelled Obamacare health programme; and so on.
That’s the sensible part. Now the bad. High quality public broadcasting is to be gutted, saving US$445 million. Funds for protecting the environment are being slashed. The State Department budget will be slashed by 28%.
Trump plans to boost the defence budget by US$54 billion to US$664 billion. But wait, that’s not all.
There are numerous big military spending programmes, veterans’ affairs, nuclear weapons, so-called homeland security, and maintenance that take the budget up to US$773 billion. Add to this paying for the “foreign contingency” wars. Plus hundreds of bases around the globe and “black programmes”, adding up to about US$1 trillion annually.
The US military budget is already larger than the defence budgets of China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, South Korea, and Japan – combined.
I had dinner one night in Nice with a French navy admiral. He told me that the US Navy’s annual budget was larger than France’s entire military budget. Russia’s military budget is around US$70 billion. That’s less than one tenth of the Pentagon’s annual budget.
It’s interesting that Trump has cut funding for US allies, culture, education, the poor, and just about everything else except the Pentagon and Israel. Not a penny was reduced from Israel’s grant of US$38 billion in arms spending over 10 years. Not a peep from Congress or Trump.
I’m sorry that Trump did not level with Americans over financing our endless wars. Today, their costs are hidden into the ever expanding national debt, now approaching US$20 trillion.
Americans should be taxed to pay for their wars. An honest war tax would show Americans the real cost of their imperial adventures and spare their children from having to pay for such dumb wars as Afghanistan and the Middle East.
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