Mamdanis hit on US military is economic idiocy heres the truth

The other day, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani told Qatari state media that the United States was “spending tens of billions of dollars on killing people” when that money “could have been used to make life easier” for the public.“There always seems to be money for war,” he went on, “but not to feed the poor.”The United States, in reality, spends immense amounts of money feeding and taking care of the poor — far more than it does on war.Yet if you listened to the left, you’d think military spending was driving the debt and squeezing the poor.National defense comprises around 13% of the federal budget, far less than the primary drivers of debt, Social Security and Medicare.We spend less on the military than we do paying down the interest on our immense $40 trillion national debt.The federal government spends around $1.3 trillion each year on means-tested welfare and “anti-poverty” programs.That’s more than the national budget of Germany.There are somewhere in the vicinity of 80 individual federal programs providing aid to the poor.Over 36 million people in the United States receive food stamps, for instance — around 11% of the population.Around 100 million Americans receive some form of government assistance.Virtually none of them pay federal individual income tax.None of this accounts for local programs: Over 23% of an average state’s expenditures go to welfare, which is not only more than they spend on public schools but far more than they spend on police, hospitals and roads combined.Then there are city government programs.In Mamdani’s New York, a record $2.71 billion in direct welfare cash assistance payments were sent out in 2025, a 70% spike from 2022.New York City also spent $14.63 billion on social programs for the poor.It spends less than half that on the police.A crude back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that the average family in New York probably contributes more than $11,000 each year to government programs that help t...