Americans Are Clueless On Budget Matters

I have believed for a while now that most Americans, while they say they want the budget to be cut, don't really understand that budget. Perhaps the best example is foreign aid. The huge majority of Americans want foreign aid to be cut, and seem to think that cutting foreign aid would make a significant difference to the budget. It would not. The truth is that foreign aid makes up less than 1% of the federal government's budget, and completely eliminating it would not make a real difference in the budget deficit.

Now a poll has come out which shows that most Americans are just as clueless about military spending. It is the Rasmussen Poll (taken on November 25th and 26th of 1,000 likely nationwide voters, with a 3 point margin of error). It shows that about 37% of voters think the United States doesn't spend enough on the military, while 27% think the spending is about right, and only 29% think the U.S. spends too much on its military budget.

Obviously, too many Americans have bought into the Republican scare tactics -- their lies that say the recent tiny cuts to the military budget has put our country at risk. The truth is that those minuscule cuts have made no difference at all in this country's ability to defend itself. In fact, the United States spends nearly half of the military spending of the entire world (all countries combined) -- and the next 15 countries combined spending still does not equal the spending of the United States.

And most of that military spending, which makes up well more than half of this country's discretionary spending, doesn't go to pay for soldier's salaries or benefits or arms. It goes to pad the profits of the corporations in the military-industrial complex -- many of them making systems that either don't work or are not needed, and some going to produce items that the military leaders say they don't even want.

The military budget could easily be cut another 25% without damaging this country's ability to defend itself, and personally, I think far more than that could and should be cut. Instead of creating pie-in-the-sky weapons systems that won't work and aren't needed, we should be spending that money to help hurting Americans, create jobs, and fix our economy.