Showing a profound disregard for good taste, the liberals at Salon.com decided to celebrate the Memorial Day weekend by running a story that disparages America’s commitment to our men and women in uniform.
Labeling America’s military as “a national security threat.” Salon insisted that the nation’s spending on national defense has imperiled our standing in the world. Evidently, providing for the common defense should be secondary to the creation of an entitlement society based on redistribution of wealth.
“At $610 billion, [the national defense budget] dwarfs the combined military budgets of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, the UK, India and Germany. Put another way, one third of all military spending [in] the world comes from the United States.” Sean Mcelwee argued in an article at Salon.com over the weekend. “The problem is, however, that the American military budget may be crowding out other crucial investments.”
Of course, the article strangely fails to mention that military spending as a percentage of GDP is at historic lows. Nor does the piece mention that the majority of America’s $3.5 trillion budget is dedicated to wealth redistribution, entitlement programs, and healthcare spending.
In fact, over 75 percent of our record-breaking tax revenue gets redistributed to pension plans, health care, education, and redistribution schemes rather than funding government’s legitimate role of defending the nation with military force.
But, let’s not let these little fact’s get in the way of Salon’s thesis.
“As the era of American hegemony winds down, it’s more important than ever for America to be able to demonstrate soft power,” the author writes.
Soft power?
“[Soft power] means first, an American model that works, for other countries to emulate. But further, it means a highly educated population, long-term investment in infrastructure, adequate health care, an [sic] society based, above all else, on opportunity. However, it’s likely that the military budget precludes these important services.”
So, our devotion to making sure America’s enemies don’t have the capability or opportunity to destroy us is crowding out our ability to build schools and bridges? Does it occur to Salon that we might need men and women in uniform to protect all these politically correct investments?
Of course, Mcelwee isn’t alone in his worry that we spend too much money protecting the country. As he points out, in 2011 the Brookings Institution wrote that “the United States is following an unfortunate path that other big countries, such as the former Soviet Union, have already taken in history, wasting too many resources and too much national wealth on military expansion, wars, and foreign interference.”
Apparently, Salon.com is worried we’re becoming too much like the Soviet Union. Didn’t the Soviet model collapse because of the crippling effects of communism? Maybe we should invest in protecting the capitalistic society that helped us survive the Cold War.
Wars are rarely an economic benefit. But investing in the protection of the American experiment shouldn’t exactly be a minor role for government. After all, what Mcelwee seems to miss is that funding for his preferred investments (schools, infrastructure, wealth redistribution, etc.) is made possible only by the capitalistic nature of our free society. Such prosperity deserves to be defended. All the infrastructure spending in the world wouldn’t help America if we didn’t have the funding to keep it from being blown up by our enemies.
Not only did Salon.com demonstrate considerable bad taste in naming America’s military as a national security threat, but it did so with an intellectual dishonesty generally reserved for propagandists and shills.
Fortunately for Salon, there are men and women in uniform (being funded by that intrinsically “evil” defense budget) who are risking their lives every day to protect liberals’ right to be so wrong.
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