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Bulldog: The Trump regime has proposed a military budget of ONE POINT FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS. Bulldog: What did we spend last year's trillion dollars on? Bulldog: That was all wasted on "underinvestment and mismanagement". Bulldog: Spending more than the next nine countries combined is underinvestment? Bulldog: It's so little. It's just an extra point five. Bulldog: When you put it that way, it's STILL FIVE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS.

NEW COMIC TWO OR THREE TIMES A WEEK, OR WHEN THE MOOD STRIKES

I know we all know that the Republicans are hypocrites and that in fact hypocrisy is considered a virtue on the right, but it seems extremely disingenuous, even for them, to claim, as as Pete Hegseth has, that the United States military has been suffering from "underinvestment". Mismanagement, I think we can all agree, has been a problem with the military going back to, I dunno, Sargon of Akkad. Giving them more money seems unlikely to solve that issue, however. Even before this attempted price hike, the United States spends more on its military than the next nine countries, and it's not like they're all commie pacifists or something. I mean, I guess China is still nominally commie. (I'm not enough of a scholar to be sure of this but I suspect the NATO countries on the list spend somewhat less than they might because they're covered, to some extent, by the US military. Just to put that out there in case some nerd wants to argue about it.)

Of course the regime is helped by the fact that they're just asking for 0.5 on top of the previous 1. If you accidentally put 1.5 tsp of baking powder in your recipe instead of 1 tsp, it'll turn out okay, right? It's only a 50 percent increase, nothing to go crazy about. Except it's 500 billion dollars, and a billion is already way bigger than most people can comfortably conceive.

Democrat messaging on this, as on the Iran War, has been "How can we afford all this when we can't afford SNAP benefits or lower taxes for the middle class or whatever?" Democrats are not, sadly, pointing out the sheer immorality of spending that money on devices to kill other people, period. This isn't a question of whether the Pentagon can justify another half a trillion. The real question is, why the fuck is the starting bid ONE TRILLION DOLLARS?