What America’s Top 1% Doesn’t Want to Hear about Funding Defense Spending

He decries the struggle over the Navy’s plans to reduce the permanent carrier fleet to 10, a step that officials say is needed to comply with mandatory budget cuts. And he objects to the plan, over the next decade, to reduce defense expenditures to just 2.6 percent of GDP, the lowest share since the end of World War II. He continues that he has yet to find a defense expert who believes that we can do this without a fundamental shift in America’s global posture and at the very least, we should be debating this issue.

Let the debate begin, including addressing the question of which Americans benefit the most from U.S. leadership in global affairs. I submit it’s the 1 percent, whose global financial interests are being protected, but who generally pay a lower tax rate than most other Americans.  To adequately fund our national defense, global affairs and homeland security, the United States needs a benefit-based tax system. If a benefit-based tax system is justifiable for Social Security, why not defense, global affairs and homeland security? 

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