The New York Times
Lindsay Koshgarian
12/15/2021
To the Editor:
“Houses Passes Defense Bill in Rare Display of Unity to Salvage Shared Priority” (news article, Dec. 8) didn’t do justice to the sheer size of the Pentagon budget. After months of intense debate over the president’s Build Back Better, at $1.8 trillion over 10 years, a Pentagon budget with annual spending ($768 billion) four times as much as those domestic investments is astounding.
The U.S. military budget is larger than that of the next 11 countries combined, and more than twice that of China, a constantly cited justification for more spending. After 20 years, the end of the war in Afghanistan resulted not in a budget decrease, but more increases. And Congress cut Build Back Better in half, but added to the president’s defense budget request.
The majority of Americans don’t support an endlessly increasing Pentagon budget. But double standards in Congress combined with low media coverage tip the scales toward that outcome, time and again.
Lindsay Koshgarian
Northampton, Mass.
The writer is program director for the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.
