oscar77, let me just respond to one or two of your highly non-reflective “answers”. my point isn’t to debate you or reject your points, but to suggest that there is more to these questions that you have considered in jotting down your quick notes.
(a) I assume that you have a healthy skepticism about “spin” – the self-serving way that government officials articulate and disseminate information/propaganda to us, the people. you may also harbour a deep distrust of the government as a matter of principle. if so, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the government always misrepresents the cost of american militarism in a few basic ways:
1. in arguments of this sort, they include social security in the overall budget, instead of excluding it as a “locked box” trust fund that stands outside the government’s budget (check your next payslip and you’ll see that FICA insurance and income taxes are separate – the government cannot touch SS, it is not part of the government’s operating budget, it is a self-paying public insurance deposit fund);
2. they exclude the cost of servicing the national debt, which is almost entirely the result of US wars and military expenses. you almost recognise this when you say that 70% of post-WW2 taxes have been spent on debt. ignoring the source of the debt reveals that your thinking about this point isn’t comprehensive enough;
3. the ancillary costs of US militarism must also be added to the military-related budget, including the on-going educational and life-long health costs that are given as special perquisites to those who are willing to fight and kill in america’s hegemonic project.
altogether, it is estimated by critics (and not just gore vidal) that in peacetime about two thirds of your income taxes go to the military machine and its debts.
(b) alaska and hawaii were late (white) settlement colonies of the united states; they were seized and colonised for security reasons related to control of the pacific and the expansionist aspirations of japan and russia/soviet union. in this they are analogous to south africa in british history, except that the indigenous populations were more thoroughly disenfranchised and/or exterminated in the cases of hawaii and alaska. the fact that you don’t think about america-the-colonial-empire playing catch-up by overpowering and destroying pre-existing nations and peoples during its last 200 years of imperial expansion once again suggests the propagandising power of the U.S. educational system and media. think “iraq invades and annexes kuwait”; now think “united states invades and annexes northern mexico/hawaii/alaska/cuba/philippines ” (so many, many examples to choose from).
(c) of course i am talking about income redistribution – it’s at the heart of any humanistic approach to the threats against freedom and fairness inherent in unrestricted wealth accumulation.
the other questions – your answers to which all sound as if they were written off the top of your head without any recourse to, or background in, scholarly literature or political-historical analysis – have similarly complex dimensions to them that “talking points” style answers don’t even begin to address.
I would like to ask: are you more interested in understanding historical and social processes that involve the united states, or are you really just wanting to defend america blindly because you love it?
