Somewhere at a theater near you, Top Gun: Maverick is serving up a feel-good drama about a plucky U.S. Navy pilot who dispatches some unnamed bad guys before he gets the girl.
Meanwhile, a real-life drama is unfolding in Washington around the massive resources we put into the real U.S. military, where the stakes are much different than in the movies.
The world of Top Gun is simple: the hero, Maverick, dispatches a nameless enemy with his fighter jet, and all is well. In the original Top Gun, the hero literally rides off into the sunset.
In real life, hundreds of Americans continue to die each day from COVID — deaths that are at this point largely preventable. Tens of thousands of Americans die each year of opioid overdoses. Millions of us are at risk of eviction or behind on rent. Millions more are about to face another hurricane and wildfire season in the age of climate change.
Needless to say, Maverick is not coming to the rescue. But that isn’t stopping some members of Congress from demanding ever more money for the military. They want well over $800,000,000,000 for the next budget.
It’s as if Top Gun were the real world and a jet …read more
Source:: Institute for Policy Studies
