(This is the final installment in my series on class warfare in America and the church’s failure to address its immorality.)
Budgets are moral documents.
How we budget our money, whether personally or as a nation, is determined by our priorities. And our priorities are an expression of our ethics, our moral concerns. As Jesus reminds us, your treasure is invested where your love is directed (my paraphrase; Matthew 6:21; Luke 12:34).
What we care about determines where and how we spend our money.
Which raises two important questions accompanied by a few implications concerning the politics of rising deficits and the ethical significance of Christian support for conservative politicians.
First, what does it say about this country when approximately 25 cents out
of every tax dollar is spent on the military-industrial complex?
For 2019, the total amount of defense spending is budgeted to be $951.5 billion; nearly 1 trillion dollars. The military alone will receive $688.6 billion of that money.
When that budget item is combined with various other tidbits, such as our 800 military outposts in some 70 countries around the world, and our standing as the #1 manufacturer and exporter of military armaments around the world, it is hard not to conclude that the U.S. finds its moral raison d’etre in the maintenance and expansion of the American Empire, no matter the cost in human lives.
How else can we explain our persistent, even habitual, addictive, military interventions across the globe? According to The National Interest, the U.S. 
“engaged in forty-six military interventions from 1948–1991, from 1992–2017 that number increased fourfold to 188.”
Those figures are incredible.
In light of the recent revelations regarding the mind-boggling, fiscal fumblings that pass for book-keeping at the Pentagon (see post #2), I suspect that no one has the slightest idea how much money has been spent on these continuously bloody exercises in global, American muscle-flexing.
But I do know this: between 2001 to 2014 the wars and continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq alone cost the U.S. $1.6 trillion. Spending on all of America’s post-9/11 wars reached $5.6 trillion by 2018. A large portion of that expense is made up of the interest payments required to service the debt created by those wars.
Yep, America fights its wars, in large part, with borrowed money.
So, when was the last time Congress tried to stop another U.S. military intervention, another war, or another bombing campaign because we could not afford it; because it was another “unfunded mandate” not included in the budget; because it would grossly inflate the ballooning national debt?
To the best of my knowledge, this has never happened. We always seem to find the money necessary for more war, which speaks volumes about the blood-thirsty American character.
Second, the national debt has become the most grotesquely manipulated budget item in our national conversation…but NOT for the reasons many suppose.
Ever since Ronald Reagan implemented the voodoo economic formula of “tax cuts for the rich + massive military spending = a growing national deficit” conservatives have eagerly used their feigned hysteria – feigned because they never complain when Republican presidents are creating this debt; in fact, as with the recent Trump tax overhaul, they applaud the creation of more debt – over the national debt as an excuse to cut the budgets of government social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start and others.
The Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell – one of the more manipulative, cynical politicians ever to sully the halls of Congress – is
already at it.
Not long after Congress passed both Trump’s disastrous new budget and his tax overhaul last year, Sen. McConnell began trumpeting the predictable, and wholly fallacious, lament that the growing national deficit is due to “the three big entitlement programs that are very popular, Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”
But his conservative mantra bemoaning our “entitlement” programs as wholly responsible for the national debt is the Republican (and weak-kneed Democratic) equivalent of Chicken Little flailing her wings and crying, “They sky is falling!”
Not only is this warning a lie, even if it were true, it would be a predictable result of our immoral budget priorities, inhuman spending decisions flaunted by Congressional conservatives every time they take out their fiscal crowbars and pull the sky down onto the heads of America’s weakest members.
Let’s think clearly about this issue:
- America does have a growing debt, but let’s be honest. That debt grows faster during Republican administrations. That claim is not partisanship; it’s just a fact. (I know, analyzing national debt is complicated. I am not suggesting that budget priorities are the sole cause of the national debt. But because conservative arguments always make it the #1 issue, I make it my primary focus.)
Sorry for the poor quality of the following image.
- Congress regularly approves budgets that (a) reduce government revenue by cutting taxes on corporations and the richest Americans, while (b) increasing the amount of taxes given over to the military-industrial complex. As Politifact explains: The two biggest drivers of the projected increase in the 2019 deficit were the Republican tax bill and the bipartisan agreement on federal spending.
- Then bi-partisan complaint erupts like clockwork insisting that the only way to reduce the national debt is by cutting bigger holes into the country’s social safety-net for the poor, the sick, the elderly and our children.
This is class warfare. It is the weaponization of our national budget, using it to bludgeon the poor while enabling the rich. It is the very behavior that God’s Old Testament prophets condemned as deserving of God’s judgement.
Some of the richest members of our society – remember that Congress is composed largely of millionaires (see post #1) – decide to give more and more of our tax dollars to support the expansion of American Empire and 
protect its multi-national, corporate investments around the world. (Read The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, by David Talbot, for a shocking account of the CIA’s history of shameless dirty-work performed in obedience to America’s richest, corporate task-masters.)
At the same time, those millionaire politicians ask the richest Americans to contribute less and less to assist the country’s most needy members. See here and here about the vast level of economic inequality in America and the global economy.)
Then these very same millionaires have the unmitigated gall to accuse senior citizens and the poor of inflating our debt burden and insisting that the only solution is to cut their benefits.
Really?! Are you kidding me?
To make matters worse, most evangelicals, who overwhelmingly vote for conservative, Republican candidates, mindlessly support this God-forsaken economic hocus-pocus.
Not only is it all a tawdry display of narcissistic political theater, it is a heartless strategy to balance the budget-breaking expense of American Empire on the trembling backs of society’s weakest members; to rip food from the mouths of children whose only healthy meal comes through a school lunch program in order to shovel new, despoiling delicacies into the voracious, gaping maw of the American war machine, endlessly thirsting for more blood.
I am sorry, but I must be emphatic.
Every follower of Jesus Christ, every disciple who is serious about conforming themselves to the image of a crucified, suffering Savior, has no choice but to decry the politics of America’s ever-expanding global warfare in the cold-hearted pursuit of America’s intensifying class warfare.
Voting matters. Why do most evangelical voters use theirs to oppress the poor at home and to wreak havoc around the world?
