Featured 16 Reasons Why The United States Can No Longer Afford To Be The Police Of The World

By Michael Snyder, on July 2nd, 2011

"....#1 Prior to the beginning of the “War on Terror” our national debt was under 6 trillion dollars. Today, it has more than doubled and currently sits at a whopping 14.3 trillion dollars [now > 19 trillion].

#2 Today, the U.S. military is in nearly 130 different nations and it has a total of about 700 military bases around the globe. It costs approximately 100 billion dollars each year to maintain these military bases.

#3 U.S. military spending is greater than the military spending of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined.

#4 The United States already accounts for 46.5% of all military spending on the planet. China is next with only 6.6%.

#5 If Bill Gates gave every penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

#6 When you throw in all “off budget” items and other categories of “defense spending” not covered in the Pentagon budget you get a grand total of somewhere between $1.01 and $1.35 trillion spent on national defense in 2010.

#7 The U.S. government borrows an average of about 168 million more dollars every single hour.

#8 The Pentagon currently gobbles up 56 percent of all discretionary spending by the federal government.

#9 Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.

#10 The cost for the first week of airstrikes on Libya was 600 million dollars. Keep in mind that the leader of the opposition in Libya has admitted that his forces contain large numbers of the same “al-Qaeda fighters” that were shooting at American troops in Iraq. So we are going broke and we are helping al-Qaeda take power in Libya at the same time.

#11 The total price tag for each F-22 fighter jet is approximately $350 million.

#12 Over the past decade, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost U.S. taxpayers well over a trillion dollars.

#13 If you went out today and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you over 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#14 Since 2001, the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan breaks down to well over $3,600 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

#15 Just one day of the war in Afghanistan costs more money than it took to build the entire Pentagon.

#16 The United States government is now responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.

The U.S. national debt is escalating out of control and all of these wars are not helping one bit.

Occupying and bombing all of these nations is not even making us safer. In fact, it is creating more enemies than it is destroying.

In addition, our military is now spread so incredibly thin that there are real questions about our ability to respond if a major threat did actually arise.

If you support our troops, then you should want the U.S. government to stop trying to police the world. We are getting a lot of young men and women hurt and killed and we are accomplishing a whole lot of nothing....."

 

Seems all empires prior to us exacted tribute from subjugated nations in order to support the projection of power. As far as I know, we've never done this, in fact quite the opposite it seems.

IMO, we're on the precipice of economic catastrophe.

 

I don't know, why don't you enlighten us. How many 'trillions' difference do you think it would make now?

 

So, you think China will front us 6-7 more trillion to defeat ISIS and take out Iran?

 

Is that all? A measly 1.24 trillion?

 

'In essence', only an idiot would not see that this situation cannot be maintained; something has to change. Did you bother to read the article?

"....Yes, the United States will always need a strong military. But with our national debt exploding at an exponential rate, can the United States really afford to continue to be the police of the world?..."