On October 28^th, the 2010 public report of the United States intelligence budget was released. “The official figures for the entire 2010 cost is $80 billion, with $27 billion in military budgets and $53 billion spread around the CIA and other groups” (1). The government has never released figures on its intelligence and spying budget before.

The enormous United States defense budget is by far the largest in the world. The defense budget for 2010 amounted to somewhere between $880 billion and 1.03 trillion dollars. If this data alone isn’t enough to make your average taxpayer cringe, this year the intelligence budget alone amounted to this many billions of dollars. To put such a large sum of money into perspective, that is more money than Russia spends on its entire military.

Without a doubt the United States of America spends more money on “defense” than the rest of the world, but why? How much is actually needed for defending and how much is for aggressive war? Furthermore, if the United States is such a beacon of human liberty and justice, and not a violent gangster state, then why spend so much? The answer is simple; the defensive budget has the sole purpose of protecting the US bourgeois.

Considering all the Tea Party hysteria relating to wasteful government spending, where is the mention of a defense budget far larger than most developing economies? With their concern over “welfare moms” supposedly exploiting the system, where is the concern over two wars of attrition? Again, the reason is quite simple: the Tea Party is both funded and supporting the plutocratic oligarchy that they supposedly condemn.

We must fight for our own defense, and not for the defense of our exploiters!

Sources:

1)      http://news.antiwar.com/2010/10/28/massive-us-intel-cost-unveiled-80-billion-for-2010/

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