The problem now is that ‘defense’ is so horridly screwed up that to fund it is equivalent to abandoning both moral values AND classic economic liberalism.
The DoD has LOST hundreds of billions of dollars, not “oh, we put those in a secret project” but lost as in “there’s no way in hell an auditor will find where the money went.”
Government contractors in general can put off getting data/objects to another location for WEEKS and then, suddenly because of the “MUST HAVE” nature of the item and the project’s deadline, throw it all together in an overnight package. {True stories, my friend was irked greatly because of the delay-until-we-HAVE-to-overnight-it waste of time and money.}
As it is, I don’t see a good reason why we shouldn’t take the responsibility of self defense upon ourselves, as Citizens of the several States, and disband the DoD, Active duty Army, NASA, etc... If they *really* are needful then we can re-found them, and in so doing reduce the bureaucratic mire/overhead that is bogging them down.
If we would do that, utterly scrap Social Security, and replace *ALL* tax law with a flat-rate of “10% of all monetary income, no waivers, exceptions, credits, breaks, or exemptions” then we could get out of our financial predicament in perhaps as little as 15 years.
yep, our nation has lost both moral and economic values.