"What can we do? The system we created and maintained only guarantees that we pay for war."

Generations of democrats have worked to bring us here. The century since the Russian Revolution could've been spent reorienting the economy away from supporting wars on behalf of private capital and instead towards elevating the lives of workers. Democrats chose to be part of the cold war instead. They're shooting misses at weather balloons and fabricating genocides in China. These are people that don't care if you live or die. They're not regretting that they can't do better emergency response. Grow up, nerd.

Ok I get that they're different funds, different bills, whatever. I don't really care how the sausage of the federal budget gets made, just the results. Stafford Beer said "The purpose of a system is what it does." And right now the American system of government is to kill people in the Middle East. The same Congress said "meh, not right now" to disaster relief, and "hell yeah!" to genocide. I don't see a lot of daylight between the two parties on the issue of genocide.

I'm also inclined to agree with Eisenhower on this one:

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.