Death and destruction continue to mount in the Middle East due to the Iran War that the United States and Israel governments initiated at the end of February. While Americans an ocean away have been spared the costs imposed directly by missile strikes and other military actions, they are being subjected to substantial economic harm from the war.
Tag: spending
Big news out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meeting this week is member governments agreeing to a declaration stating they each “commit to invest 5 percent of GDP annually on core defence requirements as well as defence-and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations.”
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DOGE Failure
Elon Musk, the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency in Donald Trump’s presidential administration, has expressed in a new interview his disappointment in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which the United States House of Representatives approved last week.
The Republican-majority United States House of Representatives demonstrated this week, through votes on several relatively modest bills, that it will just keep demanding more US government spending and control. Republican representatives often claim to support limited government and frugality, but mostly they, and their Democratic Party colleagues, keep acting as government-loving spendthrifts.
Since his first term, we have grown used to President Donald Trump badgering governments of fellow NATO countries to increase their “defense” spending to five percent of their respective GDPs. Quote marks are used in the preceding sentence because such spending by these governments, or the US, will largely be used for offense, feeding the military-industrial complex, and other purposes far removed from defense.
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A DOGE Switcheroo
Many actions associated with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been met with support from advocates of reducing the size and power of the United States government. Spending has been halted, and US government employment rolls have been reduced. But, is this all leading to a real government reduction or, instead, are the American people being set up for a grand switcheroo?
President Donald Trump’s efforts, through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and otherwise, to reduce United States government spending is the focus of much attention. Indeed, in his speech Tuesday night in the US Capitol, Trump listed several expenditures his administration had uncovered that he categorized as “appalling waste.” He also declared that his administration would balance the budget, something he noted had not been accomplished in 24 years.
It was thus peculiar that Trump slipped into his over hour and a half speech a shout-out to one of the groups most notorious for involvement in massive spending by the United States government — the military-industrial complex. The shout-out, though, was likely not understood by most people. This is because Trump did not use the term “military-industrial complex.”
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Defunding NPR
Elon Musk has talked about eliminating at least two trillion dollars of United States government yearly spending. While it would contribute a small portion toward this grand goal, a spending cut that jumps out as among the most obvious for Musk and the incoming Donald Trump administration to pursue is eliminating all US government support for National Public Radio (NPR) and its affiliated programing and radio stations.
United States House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has turned out to be an uber warmonger. He put this attitude on display in a Wednesday press conference in which he declared “I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys” as support for his push for the House to approve spending billions of dollars more in support of Ukraine’s war effort against Russia.