How much is actually needed for military spending?

On Dec. 9, The Spokesman-Review published Paul Waldman’s piece “Massive Military Spending Bill: No Questions Asked.” Why is it that we are happy to spend any amount of money for the “defense” budget (which should more appropriately be called the WAR budget)?

In the paper’s Dec. 29 edition, we see the headlines “Race for hypersonic” with the follow-up headline “Contractors could rake in billions as they compete to build next generation of weapons.” I guess that answers our question. Helping out our poor “defense” contractors in their districts is a high priority of our representatives in Congress, so they can continue to benefit from the massive amounts of lobbying dollars that are channeled into their election campaigns. The government doles out billions of dollars to the “defense” industry to develop hypersonic weapons of dubious technical feasibility, with an immense cost, which will put us into a new arms race.

How is this sane? We already have enough nuclear weaponry for global devastation. Do we really need more weapons just so we can say nah nana nah, we have more hypersonic weapons than you do? And this is at the cost of our citizens, all of them, Republican and Democrat, Black, white and Brown, because our wealth gap is created by not prioritizing our values with our dollars: everybody should have quality health care, education and jobs, all of which could be had if we didn’t blindly throw money to the “defense” budget.

Linda Greene

Spokane