The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has released a new report projecting that the US will be spending $348 billion over the next 10 years just on maintaining its existing arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The costs are split between two departments, with the Energy Department on the hook for $121 billion and the Pentagon paying the other $227 billion. The report warns that significant parts of the arsenal are going to be nearing the end of their service lifetimes, and that the cost could spiral over the next two decades.
Thus many are arguing that the $348 billion is misleadingly low, and that the already huge cost will get much worse in the mid-2020s as new weapons are ordered.
For decades, the costs of the nuclear weapons program were not well documented, but even now that the CBO releases these regular reports there is considerable dispute over the accuracy of the numbers. The most recent figures from Ploughshares argued that the overall costs, including cleanup and missile defense related expanses, brought it closer to $640 billion.
$640 billion — Money stolen from the impoverished lower half
For the laboring-class lower half of society, it rightfully owns half of the wealth, the half that should be trickling down to the laboring-class, but instead is recycled back into the economy such that it only circulates among the educated upper half. Such is the crime against humanity of a starvation minimum wage, such is plunder made legal by a criminal law.
Nukes for example, as the upper half of our Empire owns all the wealth and so loves to plunder underdeveloped nations by wars of aggression, to keep from being invaded by a rushing hoard this $640 billion must be spent on terrorizing nuke that benefit only the educated upper half.
For the grand illusion of ownership, this is the stupidity of not realizing that enslaved are we by the things that own us body and soul. For a farmer needs but one gun to keep the fox away from his chicken coop, but a rich man needs a thousand guns to keep people out of his gold mine. A harmless peace loving man turned into a deadly killer by the gold that he owns.
Your anger is righteous but your intuition about how an economy works is a bit lacking.
> For the laboring-class lower half of society, it rightfully owns half of the wealth,
God forbid to have an anarcho-socialist in charge of the factors of production,
don't bet on it. USA USA USA is flat broke.With the high valued dollar–what country wants over priced USA products
Corporatocracy: How the Corporate Welfare State Divides and Conquers
A small, readily-identifiable ruling oligarchy that no serious political observer denies the existence of is able to keep the public from attacking it by dividing them along ideological grounds so that the public spends all their time arguing over definitions and splitting doctrinal hairs instead of attacking the commonly acknowledged enemy. You couldn't ask for a more perfect system of control.
El Tonno — “God forbid to have an anarcho-socialist in charge”
Your educated upper half needs to hoard all the wealth? In the richest upper half of society that the world has ever known, with your greed driven over production and global warming about to cause the oxygen we breathe to expire in a convulsion, you Empire builders need to hoard all the plunder your brutal imperialism can muster?
Well then, how about you hoard 75% of all the wealth and allow a fourth to trickle down to the impoverished lower half? For causing half the kids in America to suffer want, what kind of anti-social stupidity is that?
jojo — “USA is flat broke. With a high valued dollar (caused by not enslaving the laboring-class lower half), what country would want over priced USA products?”
Perfection in a dictatorship being to create a paradise for the educated upper half of society, surely the slave owners in America accomplished this in 1776 by creating an Empire where the uneducated lower half was kept so impoverished that they could not afford the poll tax. Where a minimum wage law is so criminal, that the laboring-class lower half is kept so impoverished that it cannot afford to hire the politicians needed to gain liberty.
Washington76 — “ruling oligarchy… keep the public from attacking it by dividing them along ideological grounds”
Your educated upper half of society has always hoarded all wealth in this your Empire USA. So, what does such greed have to do with “ideological grounds?”