Tag: Fear Mongering

So-Called President Trump is Fear-Mongering

On By Norbert HauptIn Travels, Trump1 Comment

 

Our so-called president uses bully tactics and fear-mongering to get his way.

Here he talks about how many very bad and dangerous people may be pouring into our country.

In a country, where more people were killed in 2016 by toddlers with guns than by terrorists, I have to say that the danger of being killed by a terrorist in my mind is about the same as the danger of being hit by lightning or, in deference to Betsy DeVos, the same as the danger of being mauled by a grizzly bear.

Checking monthly tourism statistics, I found a chart that shows the number of non-residents entering the United States in the first 7 months of 2016 (through July):

non-residents-enteringThis shows  there were over 21 million people who “poured into our country” and I am sure a few of them were “bad hombres.”

770,388 came from the Middle East, and another 308,658 from Africa during that period.

The only United States terrorist attack during that period that I remember was the San Bernardino bombing, and that was perpetrated by a couple that lived and worked in the United States.

No travel ban would have stopped them.

What Trump is doing here is fear-mongering for the ultimate end of grabbing political power for himself. It’s right out of the playbook for dictators. Keep the people in a fear frenzy.

How do they expect us to treat them with any respect?

Don’t we ever learn?

And that’s my rant today about our so-called president.

U.S. Military Spending – Take Two

On By Norbert HauptIn Economy, Political, Visualizing, War4 Comments

In January of 2013, I wrote this post about U.S. Military spending. Most of the numbers and basic facts, as well as my suggestions on what to cut still stand today, three years later (the numbers used here are for 2014). However, there are some developments that I should point out:

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[IISS – click for image credit]
The U.S. military spending has gone down from $711 billion to $581 billion, if I can take the two different sources as valid and make an apples-to-apples comparison. China’s has gone down a bit, also. Russia is about the same, and so are most of the other nations. Interestingly, Saudi Arabia has doubled its spending during those years and risen to slot number 3 with $80 billion.

I put these numbers in a chart ranking the top ten military spenders in the world.

military spending 2014-1

The U.S. still spends more than the next NINE COUNTRIES COMBINED on the military, yet the population of the U.S. (321 million) is about one tenth of that of all those countries combined (3.1 billion). So overall we’re spending more than 10 times as much per capita as every other country in the world on the military. And this is AFTER all the “terrible” cuts by Obama.

Interestingly, with the rise of Saudi Arabia in this chart, they are above our ranking in spending per capita. The U.S. does about twice the spending of the major European nations per capita, about four times that of Russia and 18 times that of China.

When I listen to the Republican candidates during the debates, they are ripping into the current administration for slashing the military budget and destroying our military capability.

Really?

Are they telling me that it takes ten times the spending per capita of the next nine countries combined to defend our country?

Are we getting that much less value for our spending than China and Russia?

Seriously?

Or are we just spending stupidly, to use a Trump term?

Perhaps we should stop spending our military money in other countries. We’re not defending the United States and its citizens. We’re blowing money on the military industrial complex which has a vested interest in wars going on overseas all the time.

We are fanning the flames of terrorism on purpose. We’re killing innocent civilians and children by the scores with our drones. And at home we’re telling the voters that we have to be afraid of terrorists killing us.

Fear works.

None of this makes any sense to me.