The Wealth Transfer Nobody Talks About
US military spending takes from the poor and gives it to the rich, and nobody seems to notice or care.
American people don’t seem to see what’s right in front of them. In this short post I’ll tackle one glaring phenomenon that gets zero air time from any of the Western media, be it the traditional propagandists like CNN, Fox and MSNBC to the more progressive style of outlets. It is this: the continuous wealth transfer that is happening from the tax-paying poor to the share-holding rich through the process of arm sales to foreign countries. This is how it works:
Collect taxes from public
Take that money and give it to Israel and Ukraine
Those countries use that money to purchase arms from public US companies, increasing their shareholder value
The share-owning class benefits as their asset value increases, thus incentivizing this viscous cycle
When someone points this out, use a trickle-down economics defense that these defense companies need to hire employees and thus, this process is in fact creating American jobs
Here’s a system in a picture:
Some numbers:
As of 2024, the U.S. has committed around $75 billion in military assistance to Ukraine. Source: U.S. Department of Defense and Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. The CRS report from July 2023 states that, by mid-2023, U.S. military assistance to Ukraine was approaching $75 billion.
The U.S. signed a $38 billion military aid agreement with Israel in 2016, covering the period from 2019 to 2028. Source: U.S. State Department: Fact Sheet on U.S.-Israel Relations
In total, that is $113 billion over the last decade which has been sucked out of public funds and into defense contractors through an intermediary.
If the US media wasn’t indebted to the donor class, perhaps they’d have the foresight to dedicate time to a topic that affects most Americans directly. They are, and they don’t.