Except it does. We hurt our performance on the world stage by predominantly throwing away something close to a trillion dollars a year, plus the millions of abl

Except it does. We hurt our performance on the world stage by predominantly throwing away something close to a trillion dollars a year, plus the millions of able bodied Americans wasting their lives killing or enabling it. Take away all the waste from the DoD - from the war on terror - hell, go back, and undo all the rampant spending and insanity that existed throughout the Cold War, without all the nuke stockpiling, all the R&D and intense investment in newer and better arms, all the money we poured into foreign states to play a game of chess on the International stage with lives, cultures, and nations. Instead, spend it on research, NASA, borrow less, tax less, give us a citizens dividend, maintain infrastructure, anything even remotely productive with that money (and I do not want to hear any of that "defense spending = ROI from R&D", you are so much more efficient researching helpful things rather than ways to kill people. Where would we be? How much potential has been lost to the bloodlust of some American plutocrats playing a game of money with the lives and potential of billions? You don't feel it directly because the Fed and DoD have gotten smarter about how to act as a cancerous leech on society. Rather than forge a war economy and make it a temporary thing, that you cannot maintain long term, you simply apportion huge swathes of tax revenue and borrowed money to funding your murder games. You use your hold on mainstream media to manipulate the culture into favoring your goals. You use your position as ushers of military might to label any formidable opposition as national traitors. But no, a black hole of hundreds of billions of dollars and unfathomable amounts of human potential is a tremendous drain on any society. It will kill us. It is a slow death, by design. You are not supposed to feel it. But it is self destructive in a way only war can be.