The premise here is that debt is America's greatest crisis. I happen to agree with that view, however this story misses this mark. The data in the story is factual and is well researched. The problem is that the author is hung up on the military spending and tax cuts for the rich which are admittedly bad things. But these two things alone are not the source of all the debt issues we have facing us as a country and the author ignores that. If we cut military spending today, and taxed the hell out of the "rich", we still would have a mountain of debt to cover. The author is so sure of the target of his ire, that he misses the big picture completely, and for that he recieves an "F".

Generally AlterNet provides articles with excellent information that can be trusted for their accuracy, although Cheney and Bush probably won’t put them at the top of their nity-nite reading list. Implicit in this article is the issue that in the best of times, America overspends on its military like a drunken credit banker with someone else’s credit card. But since Cheney, Bush, and company have destroyed the military, how much more are we going to have to spend to put it everything back together again, while also buying all the new toys?

This is a thoughtful review of the impact of military spending on our economy. At first, I wondered where he was getting his figures, but the sources are mentionned as the article continues. This is also quite scary! It's time to pay attention.

United States spends 10 times as much as China on military expenditures. Additionally, a large amount of the acknowledged defense budget is "black," meaning that on top of the over $620 billion per year they admit to allocating for their contracts, there are large sections of the budget containing authorized expenditures for even more, classified projects. Classified projects do not allow for public oversight of budget, operations, and outcomes. Military strategy of not only siphoning critical resources into their own projects while blocking access of non-military assets to jobs, funding and resources, is having a debilitating effect on all Americans. So whatever "they" are "defending", it is not the daily quality of life for ... More »

Anyone unfamiliar with the magical mystery tour that is the defense budget would do well to study this outstanding analysis of the impact of excessive spending on our economy. 60 years of drunken spending on the military industrial complex will taken the U.S. oil hegemony down the same lane as the British, Dutch, and Spanish. Were he alive today, Dwight Eisenhow would be justified in issuing the loudest "I told you so!" ever uttered.

A good statement of the "military-industrial" problem.

One would be hard pressed to find a more succinct, documented analysis of the U.S. economic predicament. There is no assurance that this nation will be able to extract itself from the byzantine, interlocking businesses feeding on and creating war. Or perhaps not in time to avoid cataclysmic deconstruction. Human survival depends upon redirecting increasingly scarce resources toward building sustainable infrastructure to adapt to a post carbon, or post industrial, or whatever name sticks to the next "Age Of..."

This story starts out with completely wrong facts. Military spending as a portion of GDP has be declining since World War II. It was much higher during the 1980's. True it has increased during the last few years, but there are two wars going on. It is still much lower than the early 90's. Given this distortion of simple facts the rest of the story has zero credibility.