I live in NYC, and I worry about what might happen that could destroy this city. Our "leaders" are doing nothing to make this world a safer place. It's stupid to spend $400 billion a year on defense. We now spend more on our military budget than the rest of the world combined. In fact, the $48 billion increase requested for this year is larger than the total budget of any other country. Is it making us safer? Is having huge military budgets the way to protect what we believe in? I don't think so. Look at the Cessna scare -- the Reuters headline is US Fighters Arrived Too Late to Guard White House.

It's some kind of scary Old Testament belief. America has always been about deterrence and punishment to prevent bad things from happening, rather than prevention. How else can we explain the war on drugs? Why do we prefer to spend money on prisons and police rather than education?

Maybe the "Old Testament" thing is more of an excuse than we deserve? One could argue that we prefer punishment because there is more money to be made that way. It's hard to measure the profitability of foreign aid (and we're at the bottom of industrialized nations for our foreign aid budget). It's easier to measure what the defense contractors are making.