Biden’s 2024 Funding Proposal Is a War Budget and He Is Leading Us to War
From Aug. 7, 1789 when it was created, to September 18, 1947, the American people knew that their government had a Department of War, and that it had an Army and a Navy for that purpose, both to defend the country against attack, as it did in 1812, and to make war, as it did in the Barbary War of 1801-1805. Since then the US military has engaged in wars overe 80 times including in the Civil War. Most of those wars, whether against Native peoples as the expanding US sought their lands, or against Middleastern or Asian countries to gain access to their resources.
But all tha time, the American people knew that their government was at war and that their tax money, whether they liked it or now, was being spent on efforts to kill or be killed, for defense and for offense.
That changed in 1947, when a nation, exhausted by brutal world war that cost the US the lives of over 400,000 military personnel and left over 600.000 seriously injured, wanted peace. The problem was the Truman administration, which had a monopoly on the atomic bomb, wanted to use it to enhance the US’s pre-eminent power coming out of that global conflict that had battered and weakened all the other world powers. So even as the US began in 1946 cranking out more atomic bombs as rapidly as it could, creating close to 400 Nagasaki-sized bombs by 1950, and with the intent to use them, in 1947 President Truman had the Department of War name changed to the Department of Defense.
Housed in the world’s largest building, the Pentagon, constructed during World War II to house the giant bureaucracy of war that was contemplated even as the war was being fought, the Department of Defense was never about “defense,” for since the surrender of Japan on Aug. 15, 1945, no nation has had the capacity to attack the US with any chance of surviving such an action.
The US in fact, with the end of World War II, became an Empire supported by the most powerful military the world had ever known, and it remains so. To hide that reality from the American people, who of course have to pay for that Empire, the name of the military entity runniing the war machine had to be disguised as the Department of Defense.
It’s not easy to comprehend how enormous the US military is, whether simply as the war-making force that it is, or as the largest government organization in this country, or compared to the military forces of the rest of the world’s nations.
But the latest budget proposal by President Biden, for the 2024 fiscal year budget that, once passed by Congress next fall, will in some formtake effect this coming October 1, offers a good opportunity to try and do that.
President Biden’s proposed federal budget, which covers all federal spending for the coming fiscal year will be debated in House and Senate and eventually passed, with cuts here and increases there, but if history offers any perspective, after all the posturing and the sturm-und-drang rhetoric and media tut-tutting about its size, the final approved budget will be pretty similar to what the White House proposes. This is because so much of the total US budget is deemed mandated or untouchable. The three big “untouchable” portions, accounting for over seven-eighths or 87.5% of the total budget, consists of mandated outlays for Social Security benefits and Medicare, interest payments on the national debt, and military spending. That last category of spendint, while not mandated, in fact rarely has gotten cut but instead typically gets raised by Congress — especially by Republicans backed by Democrats afraid to be accused of being “soft on defense” or of “not supporting our troops.” That makes significantly reducing the overall federal budget almost impossible since most of the non-military part of it goes for things that most of the public in both parties actually wants fully funded, like educational funding, police funding, infrastructure funding, national parks and environmental protection, health and human services like food stamp and ren
Article from LewRockwell
