I have contended that this is due strictly to big money's desperate need to protect the military budget - the central and largest component of the general budget from the serious scrutiny that would scream for huge cuts. Our military spending budget is based strictly on interventionism - or to put it cynically - to act as the defacto muscle of the new world order, or Pax Americana. Pax Romana was financed by the tributes of conquered nations, who financed Rome's military might with high taxes - detested by nearly all within the conquered territories. The third world pays tribute indirectly in the form of slave wages, unsafe working and living conditions and massive ecosystem wreckage. Mainstream leftists such as Jesse Jackson and Pat Schroeder suggest that Europe and Japan pay tribute in the form of "sharing the burden of their own defense". Conservatives make the argument of a "dangerous world" and even insist on the foolhardy policy of ignoring strategic realities and spend as if we were prepared to endure a full scale war with a comparably armed power [maybe they hope that the electorate is locked into a 1940s mindset and will fail to recognize mega stupidity when they hear it].
The conservatives are right - it is a dangerous world; and Pax Americana is fully responsible for it. Citizen taxpayers should renounce the new world order and defund the muscle behind it. We can defend our citizens with less than a third of the money we spend on the Pentagon - and our intelligence budget is counterproductive and a TOTAL waste of money. Our goal should be to promote justice on a global scale rather than to continue promoting injustice under the guise of "peace through strength."