Eisenhauer's Cross of Iron Speech: Words of Wisdom Valid Today
by John Lawrence, January 10, 2019
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
One F-22 Raptor military jet costs $152 million. The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, the lead vessel of the U.S. Navy's latest class of carriers, and the most expensive warship in U.S. history costs $13 billion.
The cost of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) to give every American citizen $12,000 per year, the current poverty threshold, would be roughly $3.8 trillion annually. Not every American would need that amount of money. So how about the cost just to give it to the poverty stricken? According to Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, 19 million people live in deep poverty (a total family income that is below one-half of the poverty threshold) in the United States as of 2017. So to give just those 19 million people a UBI of $12,000 would cost (.06)($3.8 trillion) or $228 billion. This could be done if the defense budget, totaling about $1 trillion over all agencies concerned with defense, not just the defense department per se, were reduced by that amount. This would still leave the US with a defense budget roughly 20 times the defense budget of Russia and more than the next several highest defense budgets combined.
Wouldn't diplomacy be a lot cheaper? Isn't it about time to put the American people first? We need a Green New Deal.
