Another horrifying statistic: The incremental increase in the US military budget from 2015 to 2019 was enough to abolish world hunger AND homelessness in the United States!

Donald Trump, the US President, has increased the current military budget of the United States to 686 billion dollars annually. That’s $686,074,048,000. So often today when the social ills that face humanity are brought to the table of political action, we are told that addressing them is simply “impractical”; firstly it is said that it “cannot be afforded”, then it is said to be merely “impractical”, without much more of a reason given beyond the already implied logic of capitalist decision making.

The United States could afford, without any real issue, to raise the military budget from 637 billion in 2015 to the present 686 billion in 2019. That is nearly 50 billion dollars. Why do I bring this up? I bring this up because it is estimated that it would cost about $20 billion for the government to effectively eliminate homelessness in the United States. It is estimated to cost $30 billion dollars annually to completely abolish world hunger from the face of the earth. Together that is 50 billion dollars, or, the equivalent of the small percentage increase our military budget saw between the years 2015 and 2019. In other words, the 7 percent increase on the US military budget between 2015 and 2019 was enough to abolish world hunger and homelessness within the United States. To actually do this? Unthinkable for a capitalist politician. In the minds of the powers that be, this money was better spent going to the military than to meeting human needs and abolishing these grave social ills that we have more than enough power to abolish. This is yet another reason why we as socialists speak of politics as revolutionaries.

From the draft of an upcoming Manifesto of Red Liberty.

With sources:

Cost of Ending US Homelessness: https://thinkprogress.org/infographic-we-could-end-homelessness-with-the-money-americans-spend-on-christmas-decorations-6b49b415668c/

Cost of Ending World Hunger: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/news/04iht-04food.13446176.html and https://borgenproject.org/cost-to-end-world-hunger/

US Military Budget: https://dod.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1438798/dod-releases-fiscal-year-2019-budget-proposal/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States