Don’t buy for me, Argentina
I’ve just read reports that Canada’s military spending is the highest it’s been since WWII… up 54% over what we were spending at 9/11. We’re now the 13th largest military spender in the world, and the 6th largest in NATO. To put that into some kind of perspective, we’re only the 36th most populous nation on Earth, under such others as France, Britain, and even Argentina.
To put an even finer point on it, as of today, our national debt matches the highest it’s ever been, which was in 1997 before we started paying the debt down. The roughtly 1/4, 1/3 of the debt we’d retired by 2008? All gone. We’re back where we started. Some time today, our national debt will be the highest it’s ever been. $563 billion. About 35 million people. You do the math.
Now, admittedly, the latter item comes from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, as self-interested a group of well-heeled, right-wing greedheads as you’re ever going to meet. These are the kind of people who pay the Fraser Institute to publish “studies” that say things like the government of Canada could be run less expensively if we outsourced it to Muammar Gaddafi or something. So while I’m immediately on the defensive when it comes to the source of this news, at the same time, I don’t have a really solid reason to doubt its veracity. Trust the Ebenezer Scrooge Admiration Society to know how many pennies are, or aren’t, in the pig.
But why are we spending this money? Why now? We’ve been stuck in Afghanistan since October, 2001, longer than we were in the Second World War (with its previously matchless military spending). We’re still a member of military alliance whose raison d’etre disppeared twenty years ago. We’re surrounded by the ocean, border only one other country (who, let’s face it, we could hold off for about fifteen minutes militarily if push came to shove even if we spent every red cent on the military), and we have good relations with just about every other country on Earth. Even the ones with the only real capacity to endanger us, Russia and China, are friends and trading partners with no inclination to do so; in fact, it would be injurious to their own interests. For God’s sake, why, in the middle of the biggest recession since the Depression, when there’s been less real existential threat to Canada, North America, or the Western World than at any other time in my life or before, are we blowing money out our ass on the military, above and beyond what suited us when we were in the Cold War? This makes no sense at all.
Meanwhile, along with citizenship, every Canadian kid born this today also automatically inherits a tab of $16,000 drawing his/her first breath. Talk about original sin.
Maple Moonbat 