Friends -
Turn on the television or pick up a newspaper and you’re sure to find a number of my colleagues in the Congress expressing deep concern about the deficit and national debt.
Oh my God, we can’t possibly pass a Reconciliation Bill that expands Medicare and ensures that seniors are able to chew their food, see their loved ones and hear the world around them... it’s the deficit.
Transforming our energy systems away from fossil fuels and saving our planet for future generations? Can’t do that... it’s the deficit.
Free community college and universal pre-K? Paid family and medical leave? Affordable housing? Expanded home care, more doctors and nurses in medically underserved areas?
No, no, no, no, no... it’s our old friend the deficit.
But in just a short while, the Congress is going to vote on a $778 billion defense bill, and you know what we won’t hear much about in this debate?
That’s right. The deficit... What hypocrisy!
Let us be clear what we are talking about here:
The war in Afghanistan is over. Yet this bill includes $37 billion more than Trump’s last military budget and $25 billion more than President Biden requested.
This is a bill that has us spending more money on the military than the next 12 nations combined and more money in real inflation-adjusted dollars than we did during the height of the Cold War or during the wars in Vietnam and Korea.
This is a bill giving an obscene amount of money to an agency – the Department of Defense – with hundreds of billions of dollars of cost overruns and which remains the only federal agency that hasn’t been able to pass an independent audit in decades.
But that's not all.
On top of that, it is likely that Senate leadership will attach a so-called “competitiveness bill” that includes $52 billion in corporate welfare, no strings attached money for a handful of extremely profitable microchip companies.
And oh yes, let us not forget about the $10 billion that will go to our friend Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest people in the world, so he can take a joyride to the moon on his spaceship.
The combined cost of the defense budget and the competitiveness bill will have a total price tag of $1 trillion.
And not over 10 years like the Reconciliation Bill we are debating.
This is over 1 year.
But, somehow, I have yet to hear the wails and moans from so-called “deficit hawks” about the cost of the Defense Bill.
As a nation, our priorities have become horribly distorted.
What Congress is saying in these moments is that when it comes to the needs of working families, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and even the very habitability of our planet for future generations, we cannot afford to act.
But when it comes to finding more money for war, there’s hardly a debate.
So I will be voting against the National Defense Authorization Act, and I would urge my colleagues to do the same.
But that will never happen unless they hear from you:
A great nation is judged not by how many millionaires and billionaires it has, or by the size of its military budget. It is not judged by the greed of its largest corporations. It is judged by how well it treats its weakest and most vulnerable citizens.
A truly great nation is one that is filled with compassion and solidarity.
That is what we are fighting for.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
Paid for by Friends of Bernie Sanders
PO BOX 391, Burlington, VT 05402
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