It is so sad.  There is too much unemployment, too much poverty and too much sickness in America.  We most not give up.  We have to fix the failed policies of the past.

The US military budget is *not* the largest of the federal budget’s “sacred cows” and the US does *not* spend more than the rest of the world combined on the military.

Indeed, as measured by GDP the US spends far less — 1/3 as much — as it did on the military as under Eisenhower. Military spending has been declining, albeit not steadily, since the late-1970s. Remember the “guns vs. butter” debate? Butter won.

Even if the entire military budget and *all* discretionary spending together were cut to $0 annually, the federal government would still run a deficit.

Because by far and away the 71 federal entitlement programs are the largest “sacred cows” of the federal budget, Social Security (at $705 billion) itself being the largest single federal program, larger than the entire national budgets of every of nation in the world except for Japan and the UK.

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid account for $1.6 trillion in spending — all entitlements together count for  $2.2 trillion in spending.

Say whatever you wish about military spending (which is in fact a federal express power) but it isn’t bankrupting the country. It’s the federal government’s violation of the 10th Amendment in its creation of the myriad of “safety net” entitlements that is doing so.

As for cracking through the media monopoly: that’s because of laws that restrict what constitutes public airwaves and who gets to use them. A truly free market would have given us thousands of channels competing on the broadcast airwaves (similar to the internet) and would act as an erosional force on those oligarchical tendencies and the eventual legal corruption that tags along with monopoly powers when they are granted by a stacked/convoluted legal structure of the media marketplace.