America Can Afford To Save Its People

America Can Afford To Save Its People

By Ace Kashir

Every election cycle in America feels like watching a magician perform the same trick over and over again. A politician walks on stage. The crowd asks for healthcare. The politician reaches into an empty hat and says, “Sorry. No money.” Somebody asks for affordable housing. “Too expensive.” Free college? “Unrealistic.” Universal basic income? “Fantasy economics.”

Then, almost like divine intervention, Congress signs another defense package worth hundreds of billions of dollars and suddenly the money printer starts sounding like a DJ Mustard beat.

That’s the trick. Not that America is broke. Not that resources are limited. But that the public has been trained to associate human survival with impossibility while associating military expansion with inevitability.

Once you actually break down the federal budget, the illusion starts collapsing immediately.

The United States government spends money in three major categories: mandatory spending, discretionary spending, and interest on debt.

Mandatory spending makes up around 60 to 63% of the federal budget. This includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits, unemployment assistance, and other legally required programs. In other words, the government already operates enormous nationwide social programs at scale. The infrastructure already exists. America is not some tiny developing nation trying to figure out whether mass public assistance is possible. It already does it every single day.

Social Security alone accounts for roughly 21% of federal spending. Medicare and Medicaid together account for another 24% or so. Tens of millions of people survive because of these programs.

That’s important because it destroys one of the biggest myths in American politics: the idea that universal systems are somehow impossible to administer. No. America administers massive systems constantly. The real debate is simply about who deserves access to them.

Then you get to discretionary spending, the portion Congress actually argues over every year. This is where the priorities become impossible to ignore.

About 13 to 14% of the entire federal budget goes directly to military defense. Not 13% of discretionary spending. Not 13% of some isolated category. Thirteen percent of everything.

To put that into perspective, nearly half of all discretionary spending goes toward the military apparatus.

And when we say “military,” we are not just talking about soldiers getting boots and salaries. We are talking about overseas bases, defense contractors, weapons manufacturing, military research, foreign military operations, private contractors, endless procurement deals, aircraft programs costing billions over budget, and a global empire of logistical infrastructure stretching across the planet like a network of steel arteries.

America spends more on military defense than the next several countries combined. Meanwhile citizens inside the wealthiest nation in human history ration insulin and crowdsource rent money on social media.

That contradiction is not accidental. It is ideological. Because once you compare military spending to the cost of social programs, something uncomfortable happens: the excuses stop making sense.

Take healthcare.

The United States already spends trillions on healthcare. The problem is that it does so through an intentionally fragmented system designed to funnel public money into private industry. Medicare exists. Medicaid exists. ACA subsidies exist. Veterans healthcare exists. Employer based insurance receives tax advantages. Government money is already everywhere inside the healthcare system.

America effectively pays for healthcare already, just in the most expensive and inefficient way possible.

Administrative overhead inside private insurance systems eats billions. Pharmaceutical companies inflate prices beyond reason. Hospitals charge absurd rates because insurance negotiations distort the market into a bureaucratic nightmare. Americans pay more for healthcare than citizens in countries with universal systems while often receiving worse outcomes.

So when politicians claim universal healthcare is “too expensive,” what they often mean is that restructuring the system would threaten industries currently profiting from the chaos. That is a completely different argument.

The same thing applies to college.

Public universities used to be dramatically cheaper before decades of austerity politics shifted the burden onto students themselves. Student debt did not appear because education suddenly became impossible to fund. It appeared because America decided individuals should financially drown for the privilege of becoming educated.

Think about how absurd that really is.

The government will subsidize weapons manufacturers without blinking. It will allocate billions toward military technology, surveillance systems, and global operations. But educating its own population somehow becomes controversial.

Education is treated as a private luxury while militarization is treated as collective necessity.

And housing may be the clearest example of all.

America has more empty homes than homeless people. Read that sentence again. Not because the country lacks materials. Not because construction is impossible. Not because the economy is incapable of producing shelter. But because housing under modern capitalism is treated primarily as an investment asset rather than a human right.

The government already spends billions on housing assistance, zoning incentives, tax credits, emergency shelters, redevelopment programs, and mortgage systems. The issue is not whether federal housing policy exists. The issue is that it exists in fragmented, underfunded forms designed to stabilize markets rather than guarantee homes.

The richest nation on Earth has citizens working full time while living in cars. That is not a resource problem. That is a design problem.

Then comes the word that makes economists on television start sweating through their suit jackets: UBI. Universal Basic Income.

The immediate response is always panic. “How would we pay for it?”

But that question is rarely asked when banks receive bailouts. It is rarely asked when corporations receive subsidies. It is rarely asked when defense spending increases. Somehow only regular people trigger fiscal concern.

UBI is usually framed as a radical fantasy because people imagine it as free money materializing from thin air. But every government budget is already an expression of resource distribution. Taxes, subsidies, contracts, grants, and expenditures are all mechanisms of redistribution. The question has never been whether redistribution exists. The question is who benefits from it.

Corporations receive welfare constantly through tax breaks, subsidies, and public private partnerships. Entire industries survive because of government assistance. Yet when ordinary citizens ask for economic stability, suddenly the conversation becomes moral instead of practical.

And this is where the psychological conditioning of Americans becomes most visible.

People have been taught to see public investment in citizens as dependency, but public investment in corporations or military expansion as patriotism.

A struggling mother receiving food assistance becomes a political debate. A defense contractor receiving billions becomes Tuesday afternoon.

The priorities are inverted.

None of this means transforming America overnight would be simple. Universal healthcare, free college, guaranteed housing, and UBI would require restructuring taxation, reallocating spending, reducing waste, and confronting powerful industries whose profits depend on scarcity.

But “difficult” is not the same thing as “impossible.”

America has the resources. America has the infrastructure. America has the labor force. America has the wealth.

The issue is that wealth moves upward with astonishing efficiency while relief for ordinary people moves through Congress like a wounded animal crawling through traffic.

At its core, the federal budget is not just numbers on a spreadsheet. It is a moral document. It reveals what a nation fears, what it protects, and what it values.

And right now, America spends like a country terrified of losing global dominance while simultaneously refusing to fully invest in the survival of its own people.

The irony is brutal.

A nation wealthy enough to fund endless war tells its citizens that survival is financially unrealistic. A nation capable of building aircraft carriers says housing is too ambitious. A government that can deploy trillions during financial crises suddenly becomes helpless when children need school lunches or families need medical care.

The money exists. The capacity exists. The systems already partially exist.

What does not exist, at least not yet, is the political will to prioritize human life over institutional power.

And once people realize that, the conversation changes forever.