In a new interview with host Deirdre Bolton at Fox Business, Ron Paul explains that most United States Department of Defense spending is on militarism rather than defense. This spending on militarism, Paul continues, is “a negative,” wasting trillions of dollars on counterproductive foreign interventions that produce millions of deaths overseas while reducing Americans’ safety.
Paul, the chairman and founder of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, points out the money thrown into militarism harms the economy and contributes to the “dwindling” of the middle class in America. Spending on defense of our own country instead of on imposing the will of the US government on people overseas, Paul explains, is much cheaper in terms of both money spent and lives lost. Paul states:
It isn’t just a few billion or a hundred billion. We’re talking about several trillions of dollars that have been spent in the last 14 years, with a lot of American lives lost. And, also, four million Muslims have been killed, that we just totally ignore: They don’t exist, and it doesn’t matter, even though our foreign policy was a major contributing factor to the chaos in the Middle East.
Watch below the complete interview, in which Paul also addresses another cost of US militarism — blowback attacks on Americans: