Daily Archives: March 20, 2017

Friends of Padre Steve’s World,

Just a short couple of thoughts to start the week concerning the budget proposal of President Trump. President Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “Dollars and guns are no substitutes for brains and will power,” and this budget is long on dollars and guns but well short of brains and power.

I’m not going to spend long on this today as the budget proposal itself is probably dead in the water having invoked the ire of both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. But apart from that the budget proposal shows the moral bankruptcy of this administration. The fact that when confronted by Tucker Carlson on Fox News about the effects that killing the Affordable Care Act would have on his supporters across the country, the President basically shrugged his gave a “so what” kind of answer.

Likewise, his budget proposal, which actually raises Federal spending takes the axe to America’s diplomacy and soft power, its concern for public health and disease prevention, its neglect of crumbling infrastructure, its concern for the preservation and advancement of education and culture, and its outright condemnation of the poor and the elderly in order to fund a military buildup without enunciating a clear national strategy in order to justify it.

When I read through the proposals in the budget I was convinced of its fundamental immorality and I thought of Eisenhower’s oft quoted remarks in his Chance for Peace Speech of 1953.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Obviously the costs have to be adjusted for inflation, but the truth is that an arms buildup in absence of a clearly defined threat, is nothing more than an immoral policy that promises only war and death poverty and ignorance, disease and suffering. I am going to go back to that speech later this week because it is important to place all of this in its moral and political context.

So until tomorrow,

Peace

Padre Steve+