{"id":1604,"date":"2017-02-15T17:25:37","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T17:25:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/?p=1604"},"modified":"2017-02-15T17:25:37","modified_gmt":"2017-02-15T17:25:37","slug":"america-second-defense-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/?p=1604","title":{"rendered":"“America Second!”; defense spending…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently went to a talk at Franciscan University by a priest who had done missions work in Siberia for 20 years.\u00a0 He said sound spirituality is putting the other person’s needs before your own.\u00a0 That would seem to fly in the face of that “America First” paradigm, huh.\u00a0 Our administration’s foreign policy<\/a> paradigm would be more aligned with “America Second.”\u00a0 Seriously.\u00a0 As an example, recent data shows the U.S. Military spends 17 times more on defense — than the next 17 countries (including Russia and China) combined!\u00a0 <\/em>Overkill?\u00a0 In Richard Stubbing’s book: The Defense Game,<\/em> it’s noted that U.S. defense spending happens in a “complex and secretive world.”\u00a0 A ‘world’ often driven by a tremendous amount of unnecessary excess.\u00a0 For instance, the author (who worked on defense budgets for 20 years) notes that there has been a resistance to, say, postwar era base closings, not because of military strategics often, but because of local economies.\u00a0 “Any congress person who can’t muster the clout to hang onto a hometown base, might as well retire to a city council seat,’ wrote a reporter for the Gannett papers.\u00a0 Our administration would push for a comprehensive review that focused on obsolescence and redundancy in regard to current military bases. Closing some of these, selling the property, and such, could\u00a0 generate, say, a lot<\/em> more money for USAID projects around the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently went to a talk at Franciscan University by a priest who had done missions work in Siberia for 20 years.\u00a0 He said sound spirituality is putting the other person’s needs before your own.\u00a0 That would seem to fly …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1604"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1605,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions\/1605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/voteforjoeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}