The problem with most conventional reporting is that there are hundreds of billions of dollars in military spending outside the Pentagon’s annual budget appropriated by Congress. Even a generally authoritative source of global military spending data such as the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) underestimates U.S. spending by overlooking significant sums outside what Trump calls the Department of War and related budgets. One major example is nuclear weapons spending, which represented around $33.5 billion in net spending for FY 2025. Although nuclear forces are controlled and deployed by the U.S. military, a significant portion of the budget for maintaining and modernizing the nuclear arsenal is allocated through the Department of Energy rather than the Pentagon.

… Unfortunately, there remains ambiguity about the full scale of military spending given the poor state of Pentagon accounting practices, including its inability to pass a financial audit. Members of the public and members of Congress need a full accounting of the military budget to analyse, discuss, and debate the proper size of military spending both on its own and in relation to other non-military funding priorities.

To provide accurate spending figures, Congress should reform its budgeting practices and provide a true total military budget that combines all forms of military and war spending in one place and one true total figure. Congress also should stop appropriating, and thus hiding, money for the military in other agencies’ budgets. Until Congress begins reporting accurate numbers, members of the media and other analysts should stop repeating incomplete congressional spending data and tell the public what the country is really spending on the military and war.

  • marxismtomorrow@lemmy.today
    4·
    15 days ago

    Yes, that is capitalism. Capitalism is not the concept of trade. It is not the concept of a free market. It is not the concept of exchanging goods and services for money.

    It is the concept of rent, and the value thereof which we call Capital. If I rent my tools to you to make something in exchange for the majority (or even minority) of the value of the good produced that is doing a capitalism. That is the classic example, but extend that out and it’s still just capitalism.

    “Investing” is just renting out your currency in exchange for a minority of the value produced by it.

    When you then become a currency issuer1 and that currency becomes ultimately meaningless to you2 you’re still participating in capitalism by using it, as you are still “investing” public funds into something in order to extract value.

    1. Yes yes the federal reserve technically does this, blah blah, private institution that just so happens to print money whenever congress asks and cannot act on its own except to set interest rates for private entities printing money so it’s essentially a public entity.

    2. MMT is valid enough for how the US actually operates that I’m considering it real for this argument. It is a magic “make capital” button, making capital ultimately meaningless (hence the faith you mentioned).