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‘Ridiculous’: Pentagon doesn’t even know what to do with extra $500 billion Trump wants to spend
(www.commondreams.org)
I’m sure they’ll give it to Israel somehow
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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politics
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Give it to the poor, build housing and use soldiers for the labour under a contractor? Anything besides blow people up and fraud please.
Trump wants to buy the Army's loyalty.
You can't have a coup without the army. He's replaced the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with bootlickers probably.
But there's no money for public health, public education or anything that helps people.
Of course silly, otherwise that would mean money spent on undesirables
The really crazy part is when you look at it as a percentage of the budget and compare it to pre war levels. It isn't what you think. In 2000 the budget was $304 billion, a total of 16.7% of the federal budget. Then 2 wars later of ballooning costs and it grew all the way up to $962 billion (the 2025 approved budget. Not counting the random $500 billion he is trying to add in). But this is now only 13.7% of thr total budget. Somehow the percentage has gone down.
Now, if you know numbers you should know that percentages get messy and are misleading to look at. The real question is what the fuck is going on with the giant ballooning budget that has gotten spending so out of control that this monstrous defense spending is now somehow a lower percentage than pre-war spending??? And the real kicker is that we are ballooning on spending, but none of it is going to actually helping the people paying the taxes! None of it is helping built up infrastructure, invest in education, build communities -nothing that helps build this country.
Trump is blowing through money and we doing even get anything out of it.
He's paying himself, his family, his cronies, his handlers, his gestapo, and his billionaire donors.
All with taxpayer money that mostly comes from the working class, who are getting screwed over.
This is the same military that makes sailors at sea pay for their own food.
Shit, I thought the US military budget was at $960 billion, not $1.5 trillion.
How about universal healthcare and a high speed rail network?
Ladies and gentlemen and other distinguished guests, the party of fiscal responsibility™
They should spend it all on passing a financial audit, for once.
Accountability on their own activities? Good luck with that. They want surveillance on everyone else but would rather stay in the shadows themselves.
Give all of it to the army corps of engineers and build public transportation networks.
Someone should let them know that when it actually comes to war, railroads can be used to efficiently transport weaponry and vehicles
And the same railroads could be used for civilian transit when there's no war
Rails can do that, yes. The thing is, the military is supposed to be used outside the US. Internal military rail networks only really good for putting down internal dissent and attacking neighbors.
No, it's better to give the money to an agency focused on designing a rail network from an economic and transportation basis.
The military uses rails to move equipment for training, they also use rail for the vast amount of supplies required at installations and such.
I don't care if they use it, I just don't want them in charge of designing it.
The US Army Corps of Engineers have been designing, building, and maintaining public infrastructure for a very long time now.
Rapid urban troop movers. Must be grade separated.
Goddamn it, we've just invented trains again.
what the fuck? a good idea??? get out
Is there an index fund of just defense contractors?
- Add lobster as topping choice for daily departmental pizza parties.
If returned to tax payers, this would mean a $3,030 payment for every single one of us.
That'd at least pay the rent one month in Trump's economy.
Maybe a carton of eggs, even?
Just give it to Lockheed and Raytheon as a tip
Hmm let's give an extra $500 billion to an agency that has failed all of its financial audits...
Which, some how the Dodge waste fraud and abuse team, never seemed to get around to investigating... They claimed they would, but I guess were too busy gutting everything that was investigating musks companies before getting bored with it.
Don’t forget the canceling of any services that weren’t exclusively for white men.
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This is such a stupid way to frame it. The Pentagon would have no issue to (semi-reasonably) spend extra $50 trillion, if you give them 20 years to do it.
But most military factories are already busy pumping out equipment for Ukraine etc. And US shipyards are atrophied from underinvestment, plus no new ship designs are ready for production despite US Navy needing urgent modernization. So yes, if you tell the Pentagon to spend half a trillion in a year on short notice, that creates logistic issues. This will be true for pretty much any military, no matter how underfunded or overfunded. It does not telly you anything about whether the US military needs the money.
This has been going on for decades.
Reagan wanted a 'six hundred ship' Navy. The actual Navy had no idea what he was talking about.
Poseidon won’t even know what hit him!
remember when they had to keep increasing the budget to sustain 2 war zones for decades and then when they pulled out of both Iraq and afganistan they...kept increasing the budget???? Where the fuck is the money going?
Into creating things that destroy rather than things that are good and last, because destruction lines the pockets of capitalists better.
Failed wunderwaffe projects and grift, but I repeat myself
I can think of a few military contractors that would live a cool 500b
Here's an idea, give it back
How much does a Battlestar Galactica cost, we're gonna need one
So say we all
It's one Battlestar Galactica, Michael. What could it cost?
...And yet no one in power right now will push back against it because they don't want to be seen as "weak on defense"
That is America's biggest problem right now. Forget affordability, forget inflation. It's the sartorial problem to beat all problems: the pockets of American politicians are not deep and strong enough for all the money they have to line them with. Just think of all the poor sweatshops in Vietnam that have to re-cut, re-fit, and re-sew all the pockets.
I think the problem these people face is more about how to implement the directive to funnel most of this absurd supplementary budget directly into the pockets of a few, preferably conservative, cronies of this criminal regime...
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