This is the story that will be told to support austerity which will be used by a small cohort to accumulate even more wealth at the expense of everyone else and

This is the story that will be told to support austerity which will be used by a small cohort to accumulate even more wealth at the expense of everyone else and cause a generation of misery. What this story misses is that the government controls the money. The US Government can't go "bankrupt," it is the bank. The US Government doesn't have to "live within their means" - it is the means. The US Government can't "overspend money [they] don't have," because it has all the money, and the money printer. Sovereign nation 'debt' doesn't work like any other debt, and it's so incredibly useful on it's own that it makes sense to make a lot of it. This idea that the US Government has to pay back its debt is a fiction that has no utility any more.[1] I will agree with you that most military spending is inefficient at best, and that we should shift our focus and values to something more productive rather than something literally destructive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory