Thanks to The New Yorker, we can all be reminded of how this holiday/tradition started…

Think about it.

Yup… this is our political process at work.

Just a little food for thought and a bit of perspective with this quote of the week by Elizabeth Warren

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you.

But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory…

Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless! Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Elizabeth Warren

Just something to think about (regarding Osama Bin Laden and the fervor regarding his death) from another perspective…

“If you ignore every single thing Jesus commanded you to do you’re not a Christian, you’re just auditing. You’re not Christ’s followers, you’re just fans.”
Bill Maher

“…if this is gonna be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus is just as selfish as we are or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition… and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.” Stephen Colbert

Just a few facts…

In 2009 the Pentagon’s base military budget was $518 billion + an extra $130 billion for Iraq & Afghanistan = $648 billion for 2009 alone.

Earlier this month President Obama signed the Military Defense Authorization bill for 2010 raising the Pentagon’s base military budget to $550 billion + another $130 billion for Iraq & Afghanistan = $680 billion for 2010.

(If you’re keeping tally, that’s $1.3 trillion in defense spending for a two year time span.)

The United States has consistently ranked #1 in military expenditures and 2009 is no different… we will outspend the next 15 countries combined. Meaning, if you take the military expenditures of China, Russia, Britain, France, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, India, Brazil, Italy, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, and The Netherlands and put them all together, we spent more. (An interesting note: 12 of the 15 countries in that list are our allies.) In fact, the United States accounts for 47% of the entire world’s military spending… and if you’re worried about North Korea or Iran, well, we outspent them at a pace of 72 to 1. And just for some perspective: China (ranked number 2 on the list) spent only $89.4 billion on their military… or 5.8% of the world military spending.

Sound like overkill?

In 2008, 21% of every dollar paid in taxes went to the defense budget. (That number is sure to rise as the 2009 budget gets reconciled and all the numbers come in.) Meaning if your family makes $60,000/year this is what your portion looks like…

(ht: Rortybomb)

I’ve long found the excessive amount of money we spend as a nation on military expenditures ridiculous, especially considering how poorly we take care of our soldiers (the majority of the money goes to outdated weapons technology that has been earmarked by members of congress for their home state.) But it became a lot more real for me as this past week the Senate unveiled their own version of the Health Care Bill. There has already been a great deal of debate surrounding the bill, and it certainly won’t come to a conclusion in the near future. (Note: The point of this post is not to talk about the merits or lack of merit with the current Health Care Bill because it’s got a long way to go and in the end will look nothing like what it does in its present state… if it passes at all. Rather it’s to look at the discrepancy of our values as a country in how we spend our money.) The greatest amount of argumentation about the Health Care Bill came as the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) unveiled the cost of the bill in its current form: $848 billion over the course of ten years, or roughly $84.8 billion per year (or 12.5% of what we currently spend on our national defense–not our overall budget.)

The screams from fiscal conservatives could be heard all across the country subsequently leading to a quick “no” on health care because of the cost alone in an attempt to quickly stifle debate. However, I’m sure we could squeeze $84.8 billion dollars per year out of the Pentagon’s budget to provide health care for those who cannot afford to pay for health care on their own because of rising premiums (or roughly the equivalent of China’s defense budget…and we’d still be okay on national defense still ranking far and away as #1 in the world with.) That’s $84.8 billion to protect American’s from sickness and disease… $84.8 billion to save lives instead of $84.8 billion to take lives.

When the $680 billion dollar Military Defense Authorization Bill came across the President’s desk, there was hardly a peep on the astronomical cost… it’s nearly 10x greater than the cost of health care… where were the fiscal conservatives on that one? As a country that purportedly stands proud in our value for life, we’ve certainly got a funny way of showing it.

I grew up hearing on the news, hearing in church, hearing in school and conversations around me that “The United States of America is the greatest nation in the world.” Never before have I really questioned this notion instead blindly accepting it as truth. But recently I’ve stumbled across several statements that offer a different perspective on the “greatness” of this country and have me wondering how do we really measure greatness? Is greatness measured by our educational system? Is greatness measured by the quality of life in both longevity and care? Or perhaps greatness is measured by our freedoms?

I decided to take a look into our “measurables” to see just how great of a nation we truly are by the numbers. This is what I found:

» Health Care
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), of all the countries in the world we rank a paltry thirty-seventh (37th) behind countries like Morocco, United Arab Emirates, Colombia, Iceland, Malta and France. (France is the top country in the world for health care). In regards to life expectancy we fare slightly better ranking twenty-fourth (24th). However, as a country our overall health performance plummets to seventy-second (72nd). This quote from The Guardian helps to sum up the state of our health care system:

“Despite spending $230million an hour on healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed country.”

Not quite the statement you’d expect about the “greatest” nation in the world.

» Education:
As a product of our educational system, it’s not hard to believe that we don’t rank at the top, but what surprised me more than anything is we (the United States) don’t even crack the Top 25 in Reading, Math or Science. Canada, our neighbor to the north, ranks in the top 5 in Reading and Science and the top 10 in Math.

Not quite the statistics you’d expect about the “greatest” nation in the world.

» Freedom:
So, if education and health care don’t make you the greatest nation then it must be our freedoms, right? As the purveyor and champion of freedom in the world, it would stand to reason that we experience the greatest amount of freedom in the world. However, according to Freedom House (who provides the US with the benefit of the doubt) we tie for 21st in Freedom of the Press behind a slew of countries like Finland and Denmark, Iceland and Germany. Or take this stat for instance: The United States of America “enjoys” the greatest rate of incarceration of any country in the world at 5.6 million, or 1 in 37 adults… which doesn’t include many white-collar criminals like Bernie Madoff. (Sidenote: Why do we have so much crime in this country compared to all the others?)

We are, however quite free according to Freedom House, but not the most free. We simply reside in the upper tier with 50 other countries like France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Poland, Malta, Slovenia, Micronesia, etc. So, then if we are the “greatest” nation in the world and freedom, education, and health aren’t a part of the equation then what is it that makes us so great?

In a word: Military. We are the undisputed (undisputable) #1 country in military strength/might/power. Our defense budget is a whopping $515 billion dollars, or more than 10 times higher than Russia—the #2 country on the list.

Is this really why we’re the “greatest” country in the world? (“Agree with us or we’ll blow you up?”) Perhaps its time for us to stop saying we’re the “greatest” country in the world and start living like we are… start shifting some of that massive defense budget towards investments like health care and education—could you imagine a $200 billion infusion into our educational system?! It wouldn’t hurt our military standing in the world but it’d certainly revolutionize our children’s education!—and instead of “protecting our freedom” actually create systems and structures that promote freedom within our borders instead of working to incarcerate 1 in 37 adults.

When is enough firepower enough? Is it when we continue to stockpile it to the detriment of our children’s education? Is it when we continue to add more and more weapons of mass destruction to our arsenal to the detriment of our own health and well-being? Or is it enough when we’ve incarcerated more of our citizens than any other country?

I suppose more than anything our “defense” (offense) spending shows where our true priorities sit… and it’s certainly not an attempt to make this nation great… but rather to protect our mediocrity.