After sixteen years of squatting in Afghanistan without paying so much as a nickel in rent, America’s biggest welfare queen has just wasted untold millions of taxpayer dollars deploying a top-of-the-line luxury bomb smack dab in the middle of Bugger All, Nowhere. The entitled, mooching millennial in question is of course none other than the US military, whose insatiable appetite for free stuff gave it no qualms about deploying the fabulously expensive Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb to take out three dozen cave-dwelling ISIS goons.

How fabulously expensive? As they say in the Hamptons, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. While early reports have stated that the MOAB cost $314 million to develop and $16 million per unit to build, the Daily Caller reports that those numbers are based on a smaller kind of bomb manufactured by a private defense company, and that in reality nobody knows how much the MOAB costs.

“In fact,” adds the DC, “the Air Force doesn’t even keep track of the per unit cost, nor the cost of the program as a whole.”

Can you imagine if public schools could get away with that in America?

“Mrs. Tibbons, what’s all this construction? And what are all these animals doing here?”

“Well we’re learning about biodiversity this week, so I bought the San Diego Zoo.”

“How much is this going to cost us?”

“Dunno.”

“Okay, well I guess there’s always money for more learning. Carry on!”

I wish.

They didn’t need to have a fundraiser. There was no bake sale. They didn’t even have to tell anyone how much it cost. The Pentagon‘s books are such a mess that it’s left trillions of dollars unaccounted for, but how often does that get discussed compared to what sorts of food people should be allowed to buy with food stamps?

The word “entitlement” has been carefully married with those requiring welfare to survive over many years, so much so that it has become devoid of meaning. It hides the sheer mind-blowing entitlement it takes to squeeze trillions out of tax-paying Americans without even bothering to tell them what they’re spending it on. “There there darling, I’ll take care of that, don’t you worry your silly little head over such details.”

Meanwhile the kids go without, the roads are wrecked, people are dying from lack of healthcare and from exposure due to homelessness in cities that used to be considered jewels of the first world. But what did we get last year when we tried to elect a candidate who wanted to fix all that?

“You entitled millennials just want free stuff!”

Not that things like universal healthcare would actually wind up costing more than the current system does anyway; it would actually reduce costs overall. Not only does America have the least cost-efficient healthcare system on the planet, with healthcare services costing about twice as much as they do in any other developed nation, but Americans actually pay far more in healthcare-related taxes than any other country as well. Already. Right now. Without any of the benefits of universal healthcare, Americans pay more in healthcare-related taxes than anyone in any nation that actually gives them universal healthcare. And that’s just taxes, before you even add on co-pays and the cost of health insurance.

The obstacle isn’t that universal healthcare is unaffordable, it’s that the money would go toward taking care of the American people instead of making the nation’s plutocrats even more unfathomably wealthy than they already are.

No, social benefits are not “free stuff”, they are investments back into the nation and its people. And, unlike a $16 million bomb, that’s a gift that doesn’t disappear in a giant mushroom cloud.

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