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AnimusRex -> RE: Our Defense Budget Pours Trillions - Yes, Trillions - Down A Hole. Maybe it's time to fix that? (12/5/2009 10:08:24 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: switch2please
Let's set aside some of that budget for healthcare as a preemptive strike against future conflicts, insuring that most of us are healthy enough to defend our country if the need arises. We'll declare war on malnourishment and disease (again, ensuring our population is healthy enough to defend ourselves), build a relief fund against future disasters (damn Katrina and those other hurricanes - I mean weather-based environmental terrorists), subsidize higher education (make an associates degree the minimum requirement to enlist, and pay tuition for students committed to join the armed forces).........couldn't these all be construed as D.o.D. expenses?
And if I had wheels, I'd be a bicycle.
I realize you were being sarcastic-
But the sick fact is, reality has moved beyond your ability to mock it. As I pointed out in the thread about school lunches, free school lunches were long a dream of socialists; but during WWII when it became apparent that poor nutrition was leading to many draftees being underweight, the political establishment agreed to free school lunches as a way of ensuring healthy draft age teenagers. School lunches moved from being a socialist giveaway, to a vital strategic necessity.
The Federal Interstate Highway System was a vast multi-billion dollar program in the 1950's, to link the entire country by hi-speed freeways. It was promoted not just as a method of improving business and personal transportation, but as a way of making wartime transportation of troops and materiel mofe efficiently.
The F-22 fighter jet was not wanted or needed by the Air Force; it was deliberately designed to be constructed in 42 different states- not because this made any engineering or business sense, but because this guaranteed congressional and Senatorial support from 42 states; it was supported (and still is) by many not as a weapon for defense, but as a jobs program, a stimulus to 42 state economies.
The Department of Defense, via the Corps of Engineers and Naval Facilities Command, constructs thousands of units of apartments, houses, schools, post offices, power plants, maintenance facilities, fueling stations, and so on, across the globe, in support of our 1,000 military bases;
We are currently constructing roads, schools, medical clinics, power plants and sewage systems in Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of the COIN strategy of winning over the local populace;
However, we must constantly be reminded that the government is incapable of rebuilding anything in New Orleans because it is fundamentally incapable of doing anything right. Perhaps if Al-Quaida were to blow up the levees, part of the 900 Billion would be appropriated to win over the populace of Louisiana.
The NSA is constructing an electronic surveillance center in Utah, that will monitor and record a vast array of electronic communications as part of its anti-terrorist efforts.
However, we cannot let the government streamline medical records, because this would be intrusive, and the government is incapable of handling vast amounts of private data on American citizens.
In other words....when there is a military need for something, no matter how tangential, or absurdly connected, the money is always....always found.
So if someone can find a connection between medical care and anti-terror, we will have universal coverage within the month.
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