While the United States taxpayer was strangled with wasteful trillion-dollar wars in the Middle East, China has been building bullet trains that go 370 mph. Next time year hear some right-wing war hawk blabbering about “America’s weak defense,” remember the consequences. We’re building tanks, while they’re building bridges, highways, and new airports.
This photo was taken of a train passing through Las Vegas earlier this week. It shows several tanks loaded on a train headed for someplace. Presumably, these tanks are being shipped off to another country and a future war.
The cruel irony of seeing tens of millions of dollars in military spending while the same photo shows a cracked sidewalk and crumbling infrastructure along a desolated railroad track built during the 1930s, reveals just about everything that’s gone completely haywire with our sense of national priorities, doesn’t it? (* see correction and footnote below)
We can’t get a majority of politicians to support Build Back Better, which will partially rescue America’s crumbling roads and bridges, which have been grossly neglected for decades, But there’s always plenty of money in the budget for more tanks and bombs.
This is mass madness.
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Photo Credit: Paul D. Lane
* Correction — Not “tens of millions,” but hundreds of millions. I looked it up — each one of those tanks costs about $7 million to produce. That doesn’t include shipping, staffing, and maintenance.
* Footnote — Oh, and why are we still building tanks? What era is this, World War II? Shouldn’t we be shifting the national defense budget into cybersecurity?