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The House Armed Services Committee approved a $839 billion defense budget for 2023 on Thursday, which includes an amendment that sought $37 billion more than President Joe Biden initially requested.
The vote passed easily, 57-1. The next stop is a full House vote.
Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, told CommonDreams.org that the committee “put the demands of the military industrial-complex over the needs of the American people yet again.”
“Granting $37 billion to a war machine that can’t even pass an audit while saying that we ‘can’t afford’ what American families and communities need is quintessential hypocrisy. Congress can still correct this misstep—re-routing that funding into investments like economic stability, climate justice, and affordable health care for all Americans instead,” he said.
Reps. Jared Golden, D-Maine, and Elaine Luria, D-Va., introduced an amendment calling on the additional $37 billion. USNI News reported that the additional funding would include eight F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, for $660 million, and $1.2 billion for another Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.
“We need only look to world events in Ukraine, read reports regarding China’s plans and actions in the South China Sea, or simply read the latest headline about Iranian nuclear ambitions and North Korean missile tests, as well as ongoing terrorist threats, in order to see why this funding is necessary,” Golden said.
Luria said “In our current threat environment that we see with Russia’s unprovoked aggression towards Ukraine as well as China’s increased aggression toward Taiwan…it’s time to grow our military, not shrink our military,” Luria said. “I think this $37 billion is a start.”
The Senate’s increases require congressional approval and its bill represents a 10 percent boost from 2022, which does not include supplemental aid for Ukraine.
TRENDS FORECAST: Congress has never been more divided and disagreements seem to border on hatred from every major domestic issue… but among the only bills that get bipartisan support are for….more military spending!
Indeed, as we have reported, Democrats in both houses, even those who claim to be for peace, voted to send $40 billion to Ukraine last month to keep bloodying the killing fields.
Military spending will only continue to surge with new threats from China and Russia, and it will continue to cost millions of lives until there is a legitimate pro-peace leader.
Yet, there are minimal protests among Americans to end the foreign entanglements sapping economic resources of their declining, deep in $30 trillion nation of debt to further enriching the military/industrial/intelligence complex.
We reported last week that those critical of the budget have pointed out that the U.S. faces no threat of invasion while Americans are being smothered by record-high inflation and rising interest rates.
“If this ‘inflation’ adjustment is devoted to more F-35s, more tanks, more aircraft, and more ships—more of everything, not just higher costs for the goods DoD already needs or plans to procure—then readers should know that the ‘inflation’ argument is a mere convenient excuse,” Andrew Lautz, the director of Federal Policy for National Taxpayers Union, wrote in Responsible Statecraft last week after the Senate vote. “And when inflation abates, lawmakers will no doubt find another excuse for the next big defense budget increase.”
TRENDPOST: Congress’s price tag is slightly lower than the behemoth funding approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month that came in at $857.6 billion. (See “AMERICANS GET POORER, MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX GETS RICHER” and “WARMONGERS INC: WHILE 61 PERCENT OF AMERICANS LIVE PAYCHECK-TO-PAYCHECK, CONGRESS SENDS $13.6 BILLION FOR UKRAINE WAR.”)
Biden’s initial National Defense Authorization Act had an $813 billion price tag. Yet, even at that number, it is stealing hundreds of billions from the people in a decaying nation and giving it to the military machine.
And as we noted, before former General Lloyd Austin was appointed by the Biden Administration to head the U.S. Department of Defense, he sat on the board of directors of Raytheon, the second largest military contractor in the United States.