The discretionary budget for the U.S. government next year as proposed by Trump is depicted by the Washington Examiner in the above pie chart. It has passed the House and might pass the Senate. As long as half of Congress Members see their job as boot licking and the other half see their job as tweaking, these annual proposals are good indications of each fresh hell into which we are careening.
This pie chart includes 65.77% of federal discretionary spending for War, plus 6.57% for a woefully inadequate job of addressing the suffering of people sent into war (Veterans Affairs), 2.86% for so-called “Homeland Security” (in case you wanted to bring the wars closer), 1.61% for a State Department that is wholly subservient to the Pentagon (“State and International Program”), and 0.85% for weaponizing the solar system (NASA).
After that 77.66% of the money Congress will spend next year has been spent, what’s left? Surely all the stuff one finds in the “Priorities” and “Issues” and “Why So and So Is Running” sections of Congressional campaign websites that don’t mention the budget or foreign policy or war or peace or international law can’t be contained in 22.34% of the spending, can it?
Seriously, are ALL the things we’re warned cost money and told we can’t afford and asked how the heck we’ll pay for to be found in 22.34% of the budget?
When you ask people what sort of budget they’d like, and even when you ask them what they think the budget is, you get enormous pie slices for environmental protection and education. Here, in stark contrast, our so-called representatives are contemplating giving us 3.47% for education (4% and we might risk learning about this budget, I guess).
Proposed for Energy (presumably actual energy as opposed to the so-called Energy Department, half of which is nuclear weapons) is 2.44% — and all of it for non-renewable, Earth-destroying energy, as nothing in wind or solar is permitted — and for the EPA a whopping 0.19%. While it’s hard to get a Congress member to open their mouth and not say “compete with China,” clearly the competition is not in green energy; the U.S. competes with China approximately as an angry, drunk individual “competes” in a chess tournament by spotting it through a window and peeing on the window.
If you ask people what they want, they say housing — why not build houses at the incredible pace of building data centers? — (yeah, not a priority: Housing and Urban Development 3.33%), or they say transportation — why can’t we have fast trains like other people have? — (Transportation 1.21%), or Human and Health Services (5.01%). Even food is not high on the list (Agriculture 0.94%). Working people are not even an afterthought (Labor 0.45%, Small Business Administration 0.01%).
I know, I know, the corporate news tells you that socialists are taking over. But there should not be any difficulty in understanding that a government spending on killing people and destroying places three quarters of what it chooses how to spend each year has been taken over only by weapons companies and lunatics.
There’s another secret buried far more deeply than the facts about the federal budget, and it is this: we can stop it. We are not powerless observers. We can choose to throw ourselves onto the gears of the Military Industrial Congressional Intelligence Media Academia Think Tank complex and bring it to a halt.
Here are a couple of places to start: