Congress Approves $80 Billion Increase in Military Spending

The United States Senate has overwhelmingly approved a new spending plan, and that spending plan allocates $80 billion to the military. This is on top of the existing hundreds of billions being pissed away on our military-industrial complex, and it would bring the grand total to around $700 billion annually.

If this news somehow makes you merely shrug your shoulders and think it’s fine to spend as much money on our military as we did at the height of the war in Iraq, think about it this way: Bernie Sanders pledged to make public universities free in his 2016 campaign, and that was laughed off as ridiculous. His plan would’ve cost the federal government $47 billion annually. The United States would have had another $33 billion leftover to waste on the military if they had funded it.

The Intercept reports on this idiotic increase to military spending by also mentioning that if the additional military spending went to erasing student debt, $80 billion annually could almost completely erase it in 10 years.

Of course, Bernie’s proposal was dismissed by lawmakers as a pipe dream, far too expensive to be feasible. Yet 89 senators found this military spending increase completely feasible, as the motion was passed 89-8. From The Intercept:

Sanders joined only four other Democratic senators to vote against the bill: Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden from Oregon. Republicans Bob Corker of Tennessee, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Mike Lee of Utah also voted against it.