President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms in not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.
This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace. It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honest.
It calls upon them to answer the questions that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?
An F/A-18 Hornet lands aboard the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis. The John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group is on a scheduled deployment to the western Pacific Ocean and the Arabian Gulf.
Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Walter M. Wayman, U.S. Navy
(Via usagov)
What is the Future of Drone Warfare?
Ten years ago, the U.S. military had fewer than 60 unmanned drone aircraft in its arsenal. Today, that number is over 6,000 and rising fast. While many of these drones are only used for surveillance purposes, other models are outfitted with precision missile systems that allow them to drop up to 3,000 pounds of munitions from as high as 53,000 feet–-where they can cruise for as many as 20 hours, either on autopilot or controlled by military personnel many thousands of miles away. Although there were just 42 documented U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan during President Bush’s second term in office, that number has soared to 213 under President Obama.
Soon, drone technology will go global. Roland Paris, Professor of International Security and Governance at the University of Ottawa, asks whether we are ready for a world in which unmanned drone attacks are an acceptable part of warfare:
Many countries are trying to develop or acquire remote-controlled “drone” aircraft such as those the United States has used to kill hundreds of alleged militants in Pakistan. Before this proliferation occurs, liberal democracies should be working to clarify and strengthen international rules on the use of these weapons systems.
The U.S. seems to be taking the opposite course, extending its drone campaign to countries far removed from the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan – including Yemen and Somalia – and using rules of engagement that are, at best, obscure and, at worst, illegal.
Paris worries about the precedent the United States is establishing with its unrepentant attitude towards covert drone assassinations without geographic or temporal limits, or regard for national sovereignty.
This is a dangerously short-sighted strategy. While execution by drone may appear to be a relatively low-cost and low-risk option for dealing with America’s enemies, it legitimizes methods that other countries may be expected to follow once they acquire similar capabilities.
ONE of the biggest headaches for policymakers in many rich countries has been how to create jobs during a period of fiscal austerity and anaemic growth. The private sector has been slow to generate jobs, and government-spending cuts usually end up cutting jobs. And governments employ a lot of people: in our chart of the ten biggest global employers, below, seven are government-run. America’s defence department had 3.2m people on its payroll last year, equivalent to 1% of the country’s population. China, the world’s most populous nation and a big military spender, employs 2.3m people in its armed forces. And the number of people working for the National Health Service in England is equivalent to over 2.5% of the country’s population. The three private companies are Walmart, McDonald’s and Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, a subsidiary of which is Foxconn, a secretive electronics manufacturer.
—The Economist
In Defense of Warren Buffett
By Benjamin Landy
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett became a controversial figure last week, when his provocative op-ed, Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” landed prominently on the New York Times editorial page. “My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress,” Buffett wrote. “ It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.” His suggestion, that the government immediately raise taxes on Americans making more than $1 million — and even more so on those making in excess of $10 million — set off a firestorm of criticism from conservatives.
Among the more misguided attacks was a CNN.com opinion piece by Jeffrey Miron, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard University, who outright dismissed the significance of increased government revenues. “The first problem with Buffett’s view,” Miron writes, “is that the number of super-rich is too small for higher rates to make much difference to our budget problems. […] Imposing a 10% surcharge on this income would generate at most $73 billion in new revenue – only about 2% of federal spending.”
Miron is right that $73 billion won’t solve our “budget problems,” which I take to mean our $14.4 trillion national debt. Nobody is arguing that. But that hardly means $73 billion is inconsequential. In order to illustrate just how much money $73 billion is, I did some research to discover some of the things you could buy with that kind of money. The graphic below shows just a few examples.
If you were more militarily inclined, $73 billion could also buy you 16 Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers — the largest and most powerful capital ship in the world — or 1,327 brand new F/A-18 Super Hornets from Boeing. And $73 billion could quintuple NASA’s operating budget, providing enough funds to develop and maintain an international lunar base for the next five years, according to CSIS cost analysis. Less than half that amount would provide safe drinking water for the entire planet, helping save the nearly 6,000 children who die every day from diseases associated with contaminated water supplies.
No matter how you choose to look at it, $73 billion is a lot of money. With all of the problems our country is facing today, can we afford to turn it down?
