Reason #84: Our Never-Ending Military Expansion

To enforce our role as World Boss, our military is growing fatter than a tick on a hound dog, fed more each year by our tax dollars and our deficit spending. On the eve of World War II, we had less than 200,000 men under arms. Now, our 1.4 million-member military is spread all over the globe, with roughly 740 bases in more than 130 countries. The ignorant and disingenuous will say we’re charged with keeping the world from falling apart, when in fact, we’re the ones rendering it asunder. And taking care of all those troops takes a lot of pocket change, which is one of the reasons we spend more on defense than most other countries do on their entire national budgets.

Where does all that money go? It’s not just for boots, rations, and guns. All those troops in all those countries need diversions, and officer’s clubs and other R&R facilities don’t pay for themselves. The armed forces own over 200 golf courses around the world. I’m all for our troops getting to hit the links, but greens and fairways eat up a lot of cash for water and maintenance. And golf is just one of the pricey pastimes we taxpayers underwrite.

In Europe, our fighting men and women have a ski resort in the Bavarian Alps all for themselves. And in other parts of Germany, we recently spent more than $300,000 to renovate one of those military golf courses, as well as $9 million for a bowling alley and $16 million for a new gym. All told, we’ve got 78 different military sites in Germany, for a grand total of 18,312 acres. That’s a lot of land to maintain, and that’s only in one of the hundreds of countries where we’ve set up shop!

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