David Graeber Quotes

If you're worried about the deficit, pay attention to the fact that it's almost all attributable to military spending and the totally dysfunctional health program.

Spending on the military doesn't increase the deficit.

OK, so $1 trillion is what it costs to run the federal government for one year. So this money's going to run through September of 2016. Half of the trillion dollars goes to defense spending and the Pentagon. The other half goes to domestic spending - everything from prisons to parks. So there's also about 74 billion in there that goes to the military operations that we have ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria.

The only one benefiting from this, the American taxpayer, almost half of our taxes, our income taxes, are going to the military and to these wars.

What I say is, national defense is the most important thing we do in Washington, but there's still waste in the military budget.

If you refuse to acknowledge that there is any waste that can be culled from the military budget, you are a big-government conservative, and you cannot lay claim to balancing the budget.

I have long maintained the military budget is not a jobs bill... and will continue to support the lowest budget possible.

I cannot but say a word and look my disapproval when I hear that my country is spending millions for war and war engines-more, I have heard, than twice as much as the entire public school system costs the nation.

Don't forget what I discovered that over ninety percent of all national deficits from 1921 to 1939 were caused by payments for past, present, and future wars.

Spending an extra dollar on the D.C. public school system isn't spending an extra dollar on education. Spending an extra dollar with the Pentagon doesn't buy you an extra dollar on defense. Republicans need to look skeptically at military spending.

It is being alleged that the Federal Government is 'cutting' spending. In fact, we are not 'cutting' anything. Defense spending under this budget would rise by 4.3 percent over last year. Other discretionary spending would also rise.

Let's push the Pentagon off the fiscal cliff.

The Pentagon has a long tradition of dialing up the threat to get more dollars at budget time.

We can always find money for what the military wants.

The military always asks for more [appropriations] than it gets.

What chiefly governs the military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city.

Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so

Every dollar needlessly spent on our military … diminishes our overall security.

Sometimes Republicans want to cut the social welfare programs and yet they ask for billions and billions more for the Defense Department. I don’t take that approach.

I have spoken to Donald Trump about this. He understands the dramatic budget cuts our military has faced.

Republicans traditionally say, 'oh, we'll cut domestic spending, but we won't touch the military.' The liberals - the ones who are good - will say, 'oh, we'll cut the military, but we won't cut domestic spending.'

Of all government expenditures, defense spending is the... most stimulative to the economy.

If the military is to show the capabilities that we demand and expect of it, then the defense budget has to continue to rise.

Whenever people in Washington complain about spending cuts, they mean spending cuts that would affect defense contractors. They want to massively increase spending cuts everywhere else in the budget.

We want to make sure the military gets it right and understands that if they're going to have less money, they're going to have to spend it a lot more smartly.