Where has all the money gone (again)

If you follow the mainstream media as you source of news (rather than entertainment, which is what it actually is) you may not have seen much about the proposed 10% increase in the Pentagon’s war budget, a byproduct of the war in Ukraine. Note that this is being more than matched by some of our key allies in NATO (UK, Germany & France). This comes on top of what they and the US already spend, which in 2020 was just under $1 trillion, as compared to Russia, which spent a measly $62 billion in 2020. It puzzles me how the Russians plan to take over the rest of Eastern Europe, if they were to win the war in Ukraine, as some have posited, without spending a lot more. 

In another under-reported story, it appears that the budget for 2023 includes $7.5 billion for Project Artemis, which would return American astronauts to the Moon as early as 2025, and land the first woman and person of color on the Moon.

Here’s where it gets interesting. In another wonderful example of 3P (public-private partnership) NASA is not building the rockets, etc. itself, but contracting out the entire project. And who has been fighting over the big bucks’ contract – Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin and Elon Musk and his Space-X.

So, to be clear, the US government is about to shell out $7.5 billion to one of the two richest individuals in the world, who I might add pay a much lower percentage of their income in taxes than your average waitress, to do something the government has already shown it can do very well.

I realize that $7.5 billion is chicken feed compared to the $500,000,000,000 that will accrue to the “defense” industry (aka, Masters of War) as a result of 2023 Pentagon budget (yes, approximately 1/2 of the Pentagon's budget goes directly to Lockheed Martin, et al), but it could go a long way to combatting COVID-19 in the Global South. And that would be money well spent on defending the American people and the world as a whole.