“The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service . . .”
From Nicholas Kristof’s column in today’s NY Times on the absurd, bloated, other worldly-sized US military.
Most of us know that we spend more on our military than pretty much the entire rest of the world combined, but did you know:
• The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad . . .
• The intelligence community is so vast that more people have “top secret” clearance than live in Washington, D.C.
• The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined.
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
Whatever Works 