[Heliosprime]

SUICIDE IS PAINLESS
When you critically analyze why we would need to spend 7 times as much as China on military when there is no country on earth that can challenge us, the answer can only be OIL. Our own military came to the following chilling conclusion in their Joint Operating Environment report, issued earlier this year:

By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD.
If the US Government had taken that $14 trillion spent to save the bankers from the prison sentences they so richly deserve, and spent in on research and development, oil would no longer be a critical necessary. Remember that the entire Apollo Moon program cost only $25 billion in 1973. Adjusted for inflation that would be about $120 billion today. So, the US Government has borrowed (on your tab) and spent more than 116 times the entire cost of the Apollo Project to help the bankers buy back those fraudulent mortgage-backed securities (and write themselves some record-setting bonuses along with those campaign contributions). And for all those trillions, we did not get a great leap for mankind, nor any of the technological offshoots that powered the tech boom of the 1970s and 1980s.
All we did was feed the bankers addiction, while removing any incentive not to do it all again.
I know most people cannot grasp what $14 trillion really would have meant had it been invested in the nation instead of handed to the crooks at the banks, but here are a few things to think about.
There is a new class of nuclear reactors that use Thorium as a fuel rather than uranium. They avoid the risks of runaway reactions and cannot be used for bomb-making. This is an established technology; not some still just-out-of-reach technology like hot fusion. Currently it is estimated that a 100 Megawatt Thorium reactor would cost $200 million to build, and provide power for about 3 cents per kilowatt hour, and thorium reactors do not produce vast amounts of highly toxic radioactive waste. With an "assembly line" funded by $14 trillion dollars, almost all of the oil-fired power plants in the United States could be replaced with Thorium reactors, ending the dependency on oil and lowering electric costs at the same time.
Setting aside future technologies, just think how many schools and hospitals $14 trillion would have bought. Or how many roads could be re-paved, bridges repaired, or bullet-trains built.
Had the US Government borrowed that $14 trillion and invested it in the future of the United States, we would not have lost our technology lead and manufacturing to other countries. China would not have the fastest supercomputers, and we would not need to hitch rides on Russia's rockets to get to the space station.
Our nation did not commit suicide. It was murdered; sucked dry of all that made it live by the greedy bastards on Wall Street and their accomplices in Washington DC who have placed you and your children on the hook for $14 trillion dollars (plus whatever Bernanke spends tomorrow) without getting anything at all of value for that cash.

[berdyanskdotsu]

We let it be murdered.