Reply #44: China spends $70 billion a year on defense [View All]

[jeanpalmer]

second only to the US at $630 billion (the $630 billion does not include money spent on intelligence, Veterans affairs, military pensions, atomic energy, or interest on the debt run up to support growth in the military beginning with Reagan). Is China being attacked, or subject to attack, because it only spends $70 billion on defense? Or France at $68 billion, or the UK at $65 billion? Would the US be adequately defended if it spent the same amount of money on defense as France or the UK? What about spending $70 billion on defense, and the other $560 billion on healthcare?

People in the US have been brainwashed to accept being raped by the military industrial complex. About two-thirds of the personal income taxes they pay goes to support the military. They can't make the connection between excessive military spending and lack of affordable healthcare for all. The politicians see to it that the subject of excessive military spending doesn't come up in the discussion. Notice that Waxman didn't mention it. Even though he knows full well what the problem is.

Under the mandatory insurance scheme being floated in the current healthcare discussion, the cost of premiums for the individual was put at $4800 per year, and a family of four at about $10,000 per year ($2500 per individual). Let's use the $4800 figure (Massachusetts spends about $4650 per person in their expensive system), multiply it by 300 million people, and we get a total cost for healthcare in the US of $1.44 trillion. If we cut $500 billion from defense spending (includes ending the wars) and let Bush's tax cut expire for $190 billion, we'd have $690 billion of saving or almost half of what it would take to pay for healthcare for all. And this assumes a private insurance system. The cost presumably would be less with a government run single payer system. So it's easy to see the possibilities here.