 Senator Bernie Sanders released a statement saying that he will be voting no on the upcoming Defense Authorization Act. So here's what he says, isn't it strange how, even as we end the longest war in our nation's history, concerns about the deficit and national debt seem to melt away under the influence of the powerful military-industrial complex? He adds, combining these two pieces of legislation would push the price tag of the defense bill to over $1 trillion with very little scrutiny. Meanwhile, the Senate has spent month after month discussing the Build Back Better Act and whether we can afford to protect the children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, and the future of our planet as a nation we need to get our priorities right, I will vote no on the National Defense Authorization Act. Now the next day he released a video further explaining his reasoning and why he will be voting against this and he also took some time to call out the hypocrisy of his warmongering colleagues who always concern-troll about the debt and the deficit when it comes to priorities that actually help people, but they're conspicuously silent now that we're increasing the budget for the military yet again, whereas the concern over the deficit is nobody concerned anymore. Take a look. I wanted to tell you briefly why I'm voting against the defense bill, which is $778 billion. I find it very strange that many of my colleagues are very worried about the deficit and the national debt when it comes to the needs of working families, the children, the elderly, the sick, the poor, oh my God, we can't afford to do anything, deficit is so big, national debt is so big, but wait a minute, when it comes to the military industrial complex and the defense bill, $778 billion for one year and that is $35 billion more than Trump's last budget, $25 billion more than President Biden wanted, that's okay, we'll pass that. Don't worry about the deficit, the defense bill. Then on top of that what is likely to happen is they're going to attach another piece of legislation called the Competitive Act and that is $250 billion and in the midst of that there is $52 billion, $52 billion going to a small number of microchip companies. Now I think we do have a microchip crisis in this country, very important, we want to produce them in America, but you just don't hand out corporate wealth there to a handful of very profitable companies. You make sure there are some strings attached so the taxpayers don't get ripped off and oh yeah I forgot, also attached to this bill is $10 billion going to our good friend Jeff Bezos to help them get to the moon. So there you have a bill loaded with corporate wealth there, significantly adding to our deficit very little discussion about it, especially from the so-called deficit books. It is tragic to me that Bernie Sanders is just one of a handful of politicians saying that. If every single American actually knew about this double standard, knew about the hypocrisy of most politicians, I don't think that they would tolerate it. Imagine if more than just like five politicians said that, imagine if the mainstream media actually educated people about this. I mean we've been talking about the cost of Build Back Better for Months, but when it comes to military spending every single time it's increased, not a peep from the mainstream media, not a peep from deficit hawks. And it is absolutely absurd. Now I do want to show you by putting things into context how much we spend on the military compared to other priorities. So there's a graph that I want to show you from the absolutely brilliant Andrea Whitty of ConnectTheDotchUSA.com and what this shows is our total budget for 2018. So if you look at the yellow portion on the right, that is our discretionary budget. That's the part of the budget that Congress can actually adjust year to year. Now you see that in 2018, education got just a little tiny piece of the pie at 2.3%. Environmental spending got a tiny, tiny sliver, I mean very insignificant, less than a percent. Yet when it comes to military and defense, we chose to spend the most money on that. And this is the same thing year after year after year. Out of the money, Congress can allocate towards things in the country. And then again, they choose the military over education, over healthcare, over the environment. And this is actually going to blow your mind. But that chart from 2018, that's actually less egregious than other discretionary budgets that we've had in the past. In fact, in 2019, military spending accounted for more than half of our total discretionary budget. More than half. Now let's see what that looks like over time and how it varies. So you can see from president to president, we keep seeing increases in the military budget. And as you can see, since 1950, our military budget has continued to creep up more and more and more. It doesn't really matter who's in charge. It just keeps getting bigger. And to put things into perspective, we consistently spend more than the next 11 biggest spenders combined. And notice that in most of the countries on this list, these are allies to the United States. So for every single so-called deficit hawk, like Joe Manchin, to reliably support every single increase in the military budget, but always sound the alarms when we spend anything on people, on his constituents, I mean, you know what's going on here. In America, this is what we prioritize. When we are blowing up people in the Middle East and North Africa, we have unlimited sums of money. We don't even question it. But when it comes to people in our own country who need food, who are dying because they don't have health insurance, crickets, and anytime their needs are brought up and there's a legislative proposal, it's how are we going to pay for it? We've seen this time and again with proposals that would save lives, like Medicare for all. And I mean, you know the drill already. So it's it's bittersweet seeing this, right? Because I love seeing Bernie Sanders call out the hypocrisy of all of these corporatists in Congress and both parties. But at the same time, it's so sad that this burden of educating people about this double standard and hypocrisy from these deficit hawks, they're the only ones doing it. Bernie, AOC, Elhan Omar. It's just a few people who are saying this. We need the mainstream media to educate the public on what's going on on this double standard, but that will never happen. That will never happen. When it comes to military spending, it's never going to be a question. And that has to change. And I think it's starting to. More people are waking up, but not fast enough. Every single politician who says anything about the debt and the deficit, but votes for military budget increases every single year, they should never be taken seriously.