Repub defense budget cutters

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Jul 22 11:29:18 PDT 1999


Max Sawicky wrote:


>Here's an unappealing choice for you. Suppose the
>market tanks and unemployment goes up to nine percent.
>Would you reject a defense bill that reduced UE by
>several million people, in favor of fiscal austerity?
>You can say there are better alternatives, and of
>course there are, but they are not always available.

Talk about crackpot realism. So you're saying we should build weapons because they're the only politically possible form of public spending? Forget schools, healthcare, environmental repair and just feed the death machine? Really Max, you should get out of the Beltway more often. If this is the state of American social democracy, then we're in even worse shape than I feared.

This is lesser evilism taken to homicidal extremes. A few months ago, it was either run up big surpluses or privatize Social Security. Now you're offering the choice between idleness and death. The point should be to challenge these awful choices our rulers present us with, not trying to figure out which is the slightly less bad option.

Doug



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