LINDSAY KOSHGARIAN, lkoshgarian at nationalpriorities
Koshgarian is program director of the National Priorities Project, which just tweeted “Want to show ‘appreciation’ for troops? 1) Keep them out of pointless wars. 2) Invest in full pay & benefits. 3) Take better care of those who do return from war. And really, #1 is too often forgotten.”
Party leaders in the Senate say they have reached a budget agreement to increase military and domestic spending levels for two years.
Koshgarian said today: “Once again, Congress is selling the false story that we can finally be safe if only we hand over more money to the Pentagon. And once again, our health and future here at home comes in second, with an $80 billion discretionary increase for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons and a so-called ‘match’ of just $63 billion for everything else, ranging from the State Department to the National Institutes of Health, from public schools to Head Start. Adding insult to injury, the deal also includes an additional $71 billion for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons in a separate ‘war’ fund for which there is no equivalent in domestic spending. It’s time to stop short-changing our communities.”
She recently wrote the piece “Cut off the Pentagon Funds and Stop the March to War,” which states: “We spend more than the next eight countries combined. We spend nearly three times as much as China, nearly nine times as much as Russia, and North Korea and ISIS don’t even rate on this scale. U.S. military spending is higher than the entire GDP of Sweden. Our Pentagon is a country unto itself.”
During the campaign, candidate Trump stated: “We’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems — our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had — we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.” See video.
