Thank God we have money for more nukes

Earlier this week, the Senate quietly passed the $716 billion "John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019."

The bill, which passed 85-10 in a massive show of bipartisan support, represents a considerable boost in defense spending across the board – roughly $82 billion just for next year. [...] The annual increase by itself is bigger than the annual defense budget of Russia ($61 billion) and the two-year jump of over $165 billion eclipses the entire defense budget of China ($150 billion).

The legislation even sends the U.S. down the road to meeting the Trump administration’s lunatic goal of developing smaller, more "flexible" (read: usable) nuclear weapons, as it includes $65 million for the development of a new, lower-yield, submarine-launched nuke.

[...]

Spending on defense lobbying has actually been dropping slightly in recent years, but that may only be because the opposition to defense spending has become so anemic that lobbyists don’t really need to bother anymore.

[...]

Twenty-eight years ago, Congress passed a bill requiring federal agencies to pass financial audits. But the Department of Defense hasn’t bothered, not once. Along with Utah’s Mike Lee and Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, Bernie Sanders introduced an amendment that would have forced the DOD to conduct a successful audit by 2022.

  Matt Taibbi

Apparently, even that's too much to ask.

The proposed penalty was pocket change by DOD standards – the government would have redirected $100 million in defense spending to deficit reduction – but the amendment was killed.

Sanders, Lee, and Connecticut’s Chris Murphy also tried to introduce an amendment preventing U.S. military planes from refueling Saudi coalition bombers in the campaign against Yemen, which, by some estimates has killed over 10,000 civilians and displaced over 3 million.

The amendment, too, was killed.

Somebody tried to stop selling stealth aircraft to Turkey that might allow Russia to get its technical secrets, and that failed, too.

The ease with which this massive spending increase passed exposes all the howling we always get from think-tanks and the press whenever any ambitious social program is proposed. It’s all bunk – all of it.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.