Why am I Not Surprised

In news that should surprise no one, it turns out that most of the money being spent on aid for the Ukraine never leaves the USA, because it is diverted to the US Military Industrial Complex.

Mark Thiessen, one of the more loathsome OP/ED writers at WaPo (no small feat) argues that this means that we should spend more money, because it makes American war mongers richer.

No, it still is a waste, and it still costs all of us and makes the United States a poorer and crueler place.

Sending money to Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, and Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, and the rest of them is, to quote Dwight Eisenhower, who actually served in a war, who said:

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 fifty miles of concrete pavement. 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 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.

The fact that a small portion of our futures is returned to legislators in the form of campaign donations does not make spending on our dysfunctional war machine any less of a waste.