Are We Giant Suckers? While the US Blows Money on the Military, Europe Spends Dough on Social Programs

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

Last week, during his final European visit before retiring, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates blasted our NATO allies for spending too little on their militaries.

“The blunt reality,” he told an audience in Brussels, “is that there will be dwindling appetite” in the U.S. “to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources … to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.’’

ablaze with riots against its own “austerity” measures.

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But interestingly, conservatives simultaneously argue that lavish U.S. military spending subsidizes Europe’s social welfare programs, andthat we’re the smarter party in this deal. Our kids get the wonderful opportunity to die in distant lands, while theirs are burdened with the horrors of decent retirement security and free health care.

Max Boot, a prominent and utterly pathological neoconservative, went so far as to lament that we, too, are spending too little on the military these days, writing, “It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when the federal government spent most of its money on the armed forces. In 1962, the total federal budget was $106 billion of which $52 billion—almost half—went for defense. It wasn’t until 1976 that entitlement spending exceeded defense spending.”

What he doesn’t say is that the American Right has long opposed the kind of international security cooperation that might shift some of the cost of policing the world to other states. If we didn’t insist on doing it ourselves, perhaps we wouldn’t have to.

But I suppose that when Americans are waiting in line for food stamps—or waiting to pay their respects to a soldier who died in some godforsaken country thousands of miles away—they can take an abstract pride in being the world’s only superpower. The argument has always seemed to me like the biggest loser in Las Vegas saying that the house is a sucker.

So remember to take pride in American power, and remember that it comes at a very high price.

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