Biden’s $1Trln Military Budget To Fund ‘Boutique, Expensive, Fragile’ Equipment

Monday, US President Joe Biden unveiled a $7.3 trillion budget, including $895 billion of military funding. That number that balloons to over $1.5 trillion when including the “emergency supplemental” military spending that Biden requested from Congress and other military expenses like the Veteran Affairs and interest on security-related debt.

The request, representing the most expensive military in world history, is the result of military contractors who are incentivized “to sell expensive items, not necessarily the most useful and effective items,” Independent journalist Jim Kavanagh told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Wednesday.

We have seen in Ukraine “with the destruction of the Abrams tanks and the HIMARS missiles, that the American equipment is boutique,” Kavanagh said. “[Military contractors] send expensive, boutique, very complicated, fragile equipment,” which inflates the military budget. Kavanagh contrasted that with the simpler Russian equipment, “that’s cheaper to build and is suited for hard condition warfare.”

“The whole [US Military Contracting economy] from beginning to end is corruption and [the] destruction of society, turning us into a militarized, censored society,” referencing the “ludicrous” so-called “TikTok Ban” that just passed the US House of Representatives but gives the government sweeping powers to ban any foreign website or app it deems a threat.

Kavanagh decried the corruption while there are issues in America that could be addressed with that money, but he asserted that would get in the way of “neoliberal capitalism.”

“They’re not going to put $1 trillion or half a trillion or $10 billion into building housing for the people because that’s going to compete with private market housing,” Kavanagh explained. “Capitalists don’t care if [the government] spends billions of dollars on a sector of the economy that is going to be controlled by the government one way or another,” he continued. “But you want to build houses? You want to spend money on healthcare? You want to spend money on jobs for the people? No, because you’ll be competing with capitalists.”

The issue cannot be solved by voting for Biden’s most prominent opponent in the upcoming presidential election Kavanagh explained, because former President Donald Trump is also “focused on getting all the money to the military-industrial-complex.”

“This is the best you’re going to get from either party. Perpetual warfare, nothing to do for your healthcare, nothing to do for housing and rental, nothing to do for jobs… But $1 trillion for military plus supplemental appropriations, this is what the United States is in for if we don’t have a change and that is not going to come from either the Democrats or the Republicans.”