Andy Rooney on the Military-Industrial Conflict:
Now, we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way that our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China. Another way the government is planning on paying for the war and the hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like medicare perscriptions, highway construction, farm payments, Amtrak, national public radio, loans to graduate students. Do these sound like things you’d like to cut back on to pay for Iraq?
I’ll tell you where we ought to start saving, on our bloated military establishment. We’re paying for weapons we’ll never use. No other country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year, Japan spent $42 billion dollars, Italy spent $28 billion dollars, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion. We have 8,000 tanks, for example. One Abrams tank costs 150 times as much as a Ford stationwagon. We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. Enough to destroy all of mankind. We’re spending $200 million dollars a year on bullets alone. That’s a lot of target practice.
(Transcripts from the tireless efforts of the multitalented Lisa Rein)
(Highly recommended: Andy Rooney’s memor, My War–which I wrote about here). Curiously, the two of us had the same teacher in college!!! Andy had him in 1940; I had him in 1987.
BTW, I read somewhere that instead of gun registration we should use technology to track the sale and use of bullets.