Defense Contractors Raking In Tax Dollars As US Economy Suffers

Your tax dollars are being used to prop up defense contractors, and the Ukraine conflict is giving them everything they’ve ever wanted. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Become a member today!

Support us by becoming a monthly patron on Patreon, and help keep progressive media alive!

Find our merchandise at Teespring

Spread the word! LIKE and SHARE this video or leave a comment to help direct attention to the stories that matter. And SUBSCRIBE to stay connected with Ring of Fire's video content!

Support Ring of Fire by subscribing to our YouTube channel

Be sociable! Follow us on:

Follow more of our stories at

Subscribe to our podcast

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Your tax dollars are being used to prop up defense contractors and the Ukraine conflict is giving them everything they want. It is like a bonanza out there for the defense business. And you know, there's a story behind there that everybody misses and I don't know why because it sits right there. Okay. First of all, you got a Pentagon, that's got an $800 billion budget. Okay. So what, anytime there's a conflict, whether it's Ukraine or South America or Africa, wherever, we ship out all of our missiles, for example, we might ship out, you know, 500, 600 missiles to a certain place. And then the Pentagon goes back to the producer of that missile and says, make us 500 more. So do the math. I mean, who's making the money here. The money is the weapons industry and that's what, you know, it's what we're seeing with Ukraine with $40 billion being sent there.

Well, you know, that's a really good point that I think a lot of people don't quite understand when we talk about these military budgets every single year. You know, 700 billion, two years ago, 740. Now over 800 billion this year, we are buying all of these things every single year, but we're not necessarily the ones.

Right.

Using them. What we do just like you said, oh, there's a conflict over here. Nobody's paying attention. Take a third of our javelin missiles.

Right.

Hey, by the way, Raytheon, gotta resupply.

Make us some more.

Here's your money. There's money off the trade here.

Yeah.

And so we just, we're basically the grocery store of the defense industry.

Well, here, here.

We buy the stock and then sell it.

Here's what shocks everybody. When you tell them that every tax dollar that you pay to the government, one half, one half goes to the military and most of it goes to the defense contractors. And I mean, that's a staggering number. You pay a dollar and 50 cents of that is gonna go for this type of thing, buying missiles and sending 'em all over the world. But with, with a budget of $800 billion, there ought to be some. And I, by the way, Massachusetts, I don't know if you saw that Massachusetts is coming up with a standard where they have, there's a responsibility for the government to report how they're spending tax dollars. See, this is how this has happened. If you ask, if you ask the average person out on the street, did you know that half of your tax dollars go to things like missiles and airplanes and Pentagon, yada yada? No, they don't have any idea. So Massachusetts is saying, we gotta, we gotta end that.

Yeah. They, they wanna make it completely open to where the breakdown of how your taxes in the state are spent is available publicly to everyone. And it's a great piece of legislation. Something that we absolutely should have nationally. But I still think even if we had it nationally, even if we had it printed out and delivered to everybody's front step,

They wouldn't read it.

Still half the country would say, I've never seen it. Because they choose not to care about these things. You're, you're losing your tax dollars. You know, the national Institute of health, right, the people that are supposed to be curing cancer and Alzheimer's and all these deadly diseases, they get 45 billion a year.

Yeah.

And, and almost half of that I think is spent on just the Medicaid part of Alzheimer's treat, treatments.

Mm-hmm.

Not even cures. We're wasting so much money enriching your Raytheons and your Boeings and, and Lockheed Martins.

Yeah, exactly.

And, and people are dying of things that if we actually put the 800 billion towards it, even for one year, we're gonna start curing some things pretty darn quickly.

#rof #trofire #theringoffire #progressivenews