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(08-18-2015, 01:18 PM)michaelsean Wrote: I don't think you can call purchasing military equipment from corporations in and of itself aid. They are purchasing something.
The problem is that we are spending and wasting much more than we need to on military spending. It is a much bigger slush fund than the small amount we spend on helping out the poor.
To many conservatives want to balance the budgetr by cutting out a few million we give to people who are desperate and need the help instead of the billions that we waste on military spending.
The United States military is more than twice as powerful as any other nation on earth, yet Republicans just added $36 billion a year in "emergency" military spending to get around the rules they set in the sequester. They want to scream about the poor eating food other than bread and water, but at the same time they won't to increase by billions the amount they are pouring into the pockets of Lockheed Martin and other private companies for stuff we don't even need.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/gop-plays-budget-games-increase-defense-spending
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The waste in military spending comes from mostly R&D. Now granted, we have to have some R&D, but I have two uncles that both work for military contractors and they have both told me that probably upwards of 90% of things they work on never see the light of day, and they both believe that it's not a coincidence. These are both career military guys and conservative people but they both hate the amount of waste and abuse that goes on in the system.
As for bases around the world, it's a cost involved of being a world leader and superpower. People can say it's waste if they want, but the ability to project power and get anywhere in the world in a short time logistically has IMO kept the world relatively safe in comparison to what it would have looked like over the last 50 years with an isolationist America.
I'm against big bloated government in every sense, which is why the arguments about welfare here bore me, because the bulk of people on the liberal side of discussion just want to point to military spending and the nonsensical position that we don't spend that much on welfare.