If you want to know why America is going to hell in a fiscal hand basket, it’s because the last vestige of opposition to the Warfare State and the fiscal muggings of the military/industry/intelligence complex has utterly evaporated.
We are referring, of course, to the delirious Russophobia that has overtaken the Dems and the liberal media since they had the daylights shocked out of them by the 2016 election—a state of mental derangement that has degenerated into downright hysteria since the Helsinki Summit.
It had already been the case that anti-Russian policy actions (e.g. sanctions) pass through the Congress with bipartisan greased lightening, and defense appropriations had exploded to the highest level in post-war history in real terms.
In fact, the $716 billion just approved for FY 2019 compared to a constant dollar level of just $550 billion (2018$) in FY 1990—the final year before the Soviet Union with its 55,000 tanks and 9,000 nuclear warheads slithered off the pages of history.
So we are already spending 3o% more than at the peak of the Cold War, but you haven’t seen nothing yet. Not now that Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper have become rabid war hawks, virtually begging for military confrontation with Russia and its pipsqueak economy and pint-sized military.