More Guns, Less Butter
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
President Trump says the quiet part out loud. He is plain as day when it comes to policy preferences to line the pockets of his donor class. You can’t blame him alone for supporting the military-industrial complex, sometimes called the Blob, the enforcer of economic imperialism.
There’s a bipartisan history of like minded presidential administrations and congress critters funding war spending on the taxpayers’ dime since the Cold War. It ended with the fall of the former Soviet Union. Still, the corporate gravy train for war contractors keeps on rolling.
Meanwhile, the federal government cannot pay for guns (war) and butter (education, health and housing), according to the president, at the White House during an Easter luncheon. He promised the opposite on the campaign trail. We are supposed to forget that.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
You heard it there. State funding can replace the budget duties of the federal government, since the role of Uncle Sam is to finance war primarily, according to the president. What’s wrong with this picture?
The federal government can and does run budget shortfalls. The federal debt and deficit are proof of that. Such borrowing requires willing lenders.
State governments can do no such borrowing. One need not be an economist to see a budgetary outcome. Sharp funding cuts to education, health and housing assistance that help the U.S. working class living in blue, red and purple states.
Federal assistance to cool and heat homes? Cut. Federal assistance for nutrition? Cut.
Federal assistance for disease control? Cut. Federal assistance to address wage theft and help small businesses? Cut.
Apparently, the unprovoked U.S.-Israel war on Iran, a violation of international law, is an example of guard duty for the country. Tell that to the survivors of Israeli bombings of residential neighborhoods in South Lebanon and U.S. strikes against hospitals and schools in Iran. Israel is the top recipient of U.S. military assistance, year after year.
Trump’s 2027 budget proposal calls for a Pentagon funding increase of $445 billion, 15 times the annual price tag for Obamacare subsidies. U.S. war corporations such as Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and RTX Corporation welcome the increased federal funding. The Blob has quite an appetite.
It would feast larger in part from shifting federal assistance away from providing fresh produce to poor women and children. The proposed budget from Trump for assistance to Women, Infants and Children would create more hunger among them.
“The science-based increase to WIC’s fruit and vegetable benefits has led to meaningful improvements in how families eat,” according to a statement from Georgia Machell, head of the National WIC Association, “Young children now consume an additional ¼ cup of fruits and vegetables per day, and parents report being better able to afford a healthier, more varied diet. The proposed cuts would reverse that progress, reducing benefits to levels that would meet just 19 percent of the recommended intake for children and 12 percent for breastfeeding mothers, short of what families need to support healthy growth and development.”
It’s what the war corporations demand and get the old-fashioned way, the economic playbook since WWII. That is war spending as an economic stimulus policy. Congress and the White House receive campaign contributions from war corporations to make that policy happen.
Despite overwhelming U.S. public opposition to the current war of choice, the president is doubling down on his more guns, less butter approach to the federal budget. Meanwhile there is a global economic crisis due to the unprovoked U.S.-Israel war on Iran. The economics and politics of this are fraught with a harmful prognosis, from higher energy and fertilizer prices to use of nuclear weapons.
How the U.S. public responds is key to their best interests and that of global humanity. As citizens of an empire in decline, the American population is facing in part a battle with the Blob over federal assistance. To say that much hangs in the balance is a mighty understatement.
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