The average American taxpayer is handing over roughly $4,000 a year to fund wars that spike gas prices and bleed the treasury — while the Big Five defense contractors cash in on a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget and Congress looks the other way.
President Trump's approval rating has cratered to 32 percent, and the reason isn't exactly a mystery. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll cited by USA Today, the collapse is driven by his handling of the economy and the war on Iran, which has sent gas prices surging. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters that "Americans are frustrated with higher costs and a government they don't think is working for them." He's right about the frustration. He's just hoping you forget that his party would have written the same blank checks.
Europe Says reports that Trump requested a $445 billion increase to the defense budget, pushing total military spending toward $1.5 trillion. The beneficiaries are the usual suspects: Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and RTX — the companies behind budget-shredding boondoggles like the F-35 and the littoral combat ship. These are the same contractors whose hardware is being fired at cheap Iranian attack drones costing $20,000 to $50,000 apiece. A Patriot interceptor runs $4 million. A THAAD interceptor costs $13 million. The math is savage, and it isn't working: the U.S. has burned through so much ordnance that officials are now talking about a missile shortage. One analyst calculated the Iran war has already cost $72 billion and counting.
The political class is starting to sweat. Republican Senator Steve Daines of Montana, who heads the Senate GOP campaign committee and is retiring at year's end, compared the current environment to Bush's 2006 midterms — when gas prices doubled and public opposition to the Iraq war sealed Republican losses. Daines called it "a tough environment" at the Richard Nixon Foundation's Grand Strategy Summit. Democrats, meanwhile, smell blood. Schumer claims his party is "on the edge of taking back the Senate." But the real story isn't which party holds the gavel — it's that both parties have spent decades feeding the war machine while telling working Americans to make do with less.
Ninety years ago, Congress had the spine to do something about it. The Nye Committee of 1934, chaired by North Dakota Republican Gerald Nye, hauled the munitions industry before the Senate and exposed how arms manufacturers profited from global conflict. Senator George Norris warned at the time that the country was "going into war upon the command of gold" — sacrificing "millions of our countrymen's lives in order that other countrymen may coin their lifeblood into money." According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the average taxpayer now spends approximately $4,000 per year on war and weaponry. Where is the Nye Committee of 2026?
The Big Five don't care whether the House or Senate flips. They fund both parties. Until Congress investigates war profiteering the way it did nine decades ago, the swamp will keep draining your wallet to fill theirs.
