Despite crippling cuts to social services due to sequestration, the 2013 Defense Appropriations Bill — valued at $857 billion, including veterans’ benefits and foreign military aid — was signed into law. The bill restored many of the automatic cuts called for under sequestration and permitted continued funding of several procurement projects — some of which the military explicitly said it did not want.
“We cannot keep asking the military to perform mission after mission with a sequestration and military cuts hanging over their heads,” Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told CNN. “We have to take care of our own people first.” Meanwhile, everything — from Medicare and Medicaid to Head Start funding to unemployment compensation — have taken a critical hit under the automatic cuts.
But what if, say, half of the allocated defense spending — $429 billion — was used to promote the social welfare? The United States would still have the biggest and most expensive military in the world, but it might also have full funding for the Head Start program, free college tuition for all American university students, full health insurance coverage for all uninsured American families, adequate food for every single hungry person in the U.S. and a raise in the federal minimum wage to $11 per hour — subsidized in full by the federal government.
The reality is that no American needs to go hungry, be uninsured or worry about how to pay for their children to go to college. The resources to change lives are readily available now, if this nation was willing to reconsider its priorities.