The Permanent Militarization of America

[Junior]

Eisenhower understood the trade-offs between guns and butter. “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 warned in 1953, early in his presidency. “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.”

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/opinion/the-permanent-militarization-of-america.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=all

 

This is a really well written article and I think it raises an awful lot of salient points, both about what we could be spending our money on domestically, and about the politicians use of "supporting the troops" as a disgusting game.