The Trump Train

    One has to wonder, after the recent election results are in, if the passengers on the Trump Train are growing weary of having their train follow a garbage truck.  It seems that lying is not winning elections any more … at least not obvious lying.  Are the train passengers getting off?  Yes but, I suppose some will always remain in waiting.  Hell, J. Edgar Hoover’s name still appears in large letters on our FBI national headquarters.  When our country remembers Donald Trump with the same lack of affection as it remembers Dick Nixon or J Edgar Hoover with, I suppose we will be cured.  Or perhaps the Republican Party would rally around Nixon today.  Hard to say.  However, it was nice to see that the election deniers of the 2020 election had so little traction.  The Democrats won the midterms by not losing.  Congratulations.

  Now let’s take a step back.  Your legislative representatives, in the House and the Senate, have come together in a bipartisan, large majority vote, 80 some percent, to usher in a proposed annual military budget, 30 to 40 billion dollars larger than the 2022 budget, which was already larger than the budgets of the next 10 nation’s budgets COMBINED (check this for yourself).  The most recent annual military budget figures, for the world, I was able to research were from 2019.  The US expenditure was $732 Billion.  The next 5 nations (China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia & France) totaled $574.3 Billion.  So if the US spent only what the next 5 nations combined spent, we would have saved $157.7 Billion in one year alone.  Add to this the 30-40 billion dollar annual increase that our legislators add on and you are looking at a savings of a couple of hundred billion dollars annually.  A billion is a thousand million and a million is a thousand thousands.  Two hundred billion dollars is a lot of money.  Could we defend America spending only what the next 5 nations of the world combined spend, rather than the next 10 nations?

    My suggestion for using the 200 billion each year would be to buy back the rain forest and turn it back into a forest & jungle.  This would be done by a world wide consortium or foundation.  The countries the forest is in would be responsible for its maintenance and would be paid for the oxygen produced by the consortium.  Maintenance should not be too difficult since that rain forest is the natural state of that section of the Earth.  We can cure climate change.  All it requires is considering ourselves Patriots of The Planet, not American Patriots.  If we put the planet first it will be the best action we can take, not just for ourselves, but for all living things.  Or, would you rather continue to put our military first and see where that leads?

  We are the most powerful thinking species on this planet.  Isn’t it about time our actions were a benefit to the planet rather than the planet’s destroyer?

Cheers, Old Buz     11/18/2022

 

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Patriotism: “Willful blindness, guided by the random location of one’s birth.” – Old Buz