“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
— Dwight David Eisenhower
I’ve tried to express this a number of times to people who have repeated the canard that “war is good for the economy”. Warfare is, in fact, a colossal waste of resources that could be spent building infrastructure and people. For example, Congress has just canceled the DDG 1000 destroyer program that had a cost per unit of about $5 billion dollars after two boats had been built.
Ten billion dollars for two battleships. For perspective, the money spent on this one program is almost twice the total funding for the National Science Foundation which provides grants and funding for a significant fraction of the scientific research in the US. It’s frustrating to listen to our President boast about his funding of scientific research when the entirety of NSF funding is dwarfed by a single military program.
As a people, we need to seriously reconsider our priorities.
