CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

More Guns, Less Butter

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

President Trump says the quiet part out loud. He is plain as day when it comes to policy preferences to line the pockets of his donor class. You can’t blame him alone for supporting the military-industrial complex, sometimes called the Blob, the enforcer of economic imperialism.

There’s a bipartisan history of like minded presidential administrations and congress critters funding war spending on the taxpayers’ dime since the Cold War. It ended with the fall of the former Soviet Union. Still, the corporate gravy train for war contractors keeps on rolling.

Meanwhile, the federal government cannot pay for guns (war) and butter (education, health and housing), according to the president, at the White House during an Easter luncheon. He promised the opposite on the campaign trail. We are supposed to forget that.

“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said. “They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

You heard it there. State funding can replace the budget duties of the federal government, since the role of Uncle Sam is to finance war primarily, according to the president. What’s wrong with this picture?

The federal government can and does run budget shortfalls.........

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