This is a snip form a larger article about he Iraq war.

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17665432/

[snip]

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates acknowledged in Congressional testimony last month that his department’s 2008 budget request, along with supplemental funding for the war, had produced some “sticker shock.” But he pointed out that defense and war spending is still only about 4 percent of the nation’s total economic output, a much smaller fraction that it has been historically.

If anything, notes former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, that’s a testament to how big and strong the U.S. economy has become in the past few decades.

“We’ve demonstrated tremendous capacity to do a very, very expensive program,” said Kerrey, a Democrat who now serves as president of the New School.
[snip]


So if we have “demonstrated tremendous capacity to do a very, very expensive program” why don’t we ever demonstrate this capacity in anything other than war? The infrastructure of this country is falling apart. Just today I read an article quoting the Italian architect who designed the new train station for ground zero saying that the infrastructure of New York is terrible, worse than European cities. Our education system is under funded. We don’t have health care for this nations children let alone everyone. Kennedy took us to the moon and since then we are providing a solution for the Fermi Paradox. What happened to the once inventive and intelligent Americans?