Trump Says He Can't Afford Your Kids. Now He Wants $1.5 Trillion to Keep His War Going.

 https://mitchthelawyer.substack.com/p/trump-says-he-cant-afford-your-kids

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Today the Trump administration said it is asking Congress for $1.5 trillion in military spending for 2027, the highest level in modern American history. Mitch Jackson Apr 3   READ IN APP   The President of the United States stood before the American people this week and told you, to your face, that he cannot afford to take care of your kids. Your daycare. Your health coverage. Your aging parents. He said those things are your problem now. Let the states figure it out. And then, in the same breath, he said he is asking Congress to hand him $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon. The largest military budget in modern American history. For a war he started without your permission. Let that sink in for a second. The man who promised you “America First” is spending America’s future on a war in Iran that no one in Congress voted to authorize, that no one asked for, and that is draining roughly one billion dollars from the national treasury every single day it continues. This is not a policy disagreement. This is an act of financial violence against every American family trying to keep a roof overhead and food on the table. Your Money, His War On February 28, 2026, Donald Trump launched a coordinated military strike on Iran alongside Israel. He killed Iran’s Supreme Leader. He sent bombs crashing into cities across the country. And he did all of this without seeking or receiving a single vote from your elected representatives in Congress. The Constitution is blunt about this. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress, and Congress alone, the authority to declare war. That is not a gray area. That is not a technicality. It is the foundational agreement between the government and the governed. You send your sons and daughters to fight when the people’s representatives say so. Period. Trump skipped that part entirely. He notified a handful of congressional leaders minutes before the bombs fell. He filed a 48 hour report after the fact. And when members of both parties tried to invoke the War Powers Act and force a vote on whether this war should continue, the effort failed. The Senate killed the resolution 53 to 47. The House followed the next day, 219 to 212. Your representatives were told to sit down and be quiet. Five weeks later, 13 American service members are dead. This morning it’s being reported that one of our jets was shot down over Iran and our pilot is missing. Nearly 2,000 Iranian civilians have been killed, including hundreds of children. Oil prices have surged more than 50 percent since the Strait of Hormuz was choked off. Gas prices are climbing toward four dollars a gallon. Global airlines are cutting flights. Food costs are spiking as fertilizer supply chains collapse. And there is still no exit strategy, no endgame, and no honest conversation with the American people about what this war is supposed to accomplish. The Numbers That Should Make You Sick The first six days of this war cost $11.3 billion. That figure, disclosed by the Pentagon itself, covered only the opening salvo. It did not include operating costs for aircraft carriers, destroyers, and the thousands of personnel deployed across the region. By day twelve, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated the total at $16.5 billion. By the end of March, the Center for American Progress projected costs had crossed $25 billion. The Pentagon burned through $5.6 billion in munitions in the first 48 hours alone. And now the administration wants more. The Department of Defense has asked the White House to approve a $200 billion supplemental funding request for the war. That is on top of the $1.5 trillion budget proposal released today. On top of the $150 billion in extra Pentagon money Congress already approved in last year’s tax cut package. When Senator Elizabeth Warren pressed the director of the Congressional Budget Office on these numbers, the math was devastating. The cost of extending affordable health care subsidies for one full year? Thirty billion dollars. The cost of just the first month of this war? More than that. You read that correctly. The money Trump is spending on one month of bombing Iran could have kept millions of Americans insured for an entire year. What $1.5 Trillion Looks Like When You Spend It on People That $1.5 trillion military budget is not an abstract number. It represents a choice. And the alternative choices are staggering. Consider what a fraction of that money could do. The administration is proposing to slash domestic spending by 10 percent across the board. It wants to gut teacher training programs, calling funding for educators “indoctrination.” It wants to cancel $15 billion in clean energy investments, including money for renewable energy and electric vehicle infrastructure that was already approved by Congress on a bipartisan basis. It is targeting housing discrimination programs, minority business lending, and community development grants that help low income families access parks, sewer systems, and affordable housing. It is labeling spending on communities of color as “woke” and “cultural Marxism.” Those are not policy arguments. Those are culture war slogans being used to justify pulling the financial rug out from under your neighbors. The so called Big Beautiful Bill that passed last year already cut $900 billion from Medicaid over the next decade, gutted food assistance for millions of families including children, and let enhanced health care subsidies expire, leaving as many as one in ten Americans who previously had insurance through the Affordable Care Act now uninsured. And the president’s response to all of this suffering? “We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of daycare.” Think about what a government that prioritized its own citizens could do with this money. Thirty billion dollars could extend health care subsidies for a year. Sixty billion could extend them for two. The full cost of making those subsidies permanent for a decade? Three hundred fifty billion. That is less than the $350 billion reconciliation package Trump is requesting for the Pentagon on top of the $1.15 trillion base budget. Picture your kid’s school. Picture your local food bank. Picture your grandmother’s Medicare coverage. Picture the bridge in your town that needs repair, the clinic that keeps its lights on with federal grants, the rental assistance that keeps your neighbor from sleeping in a car. All of that is being sacrificed so the Pentagon, an institution that has never once passed a financial audit, can receive the largest year over year spending increase since the Korean War. A War Without a Vote, A Budget Without a Plan This budget does not even include 10 year deficit projections. The White House is deliberately withholding a full picture of what this spending spree will do to the national debt. And the numbers that independent analysts have produced are alarming. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that this level of military spending would add between $5 trillion and $7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. The debt already stands at $39 trillion. Interest payments on that debt already consume nearly one fifth of all federal spending. This is governance by fantasy. And you are paying for it at the gas pump, at the grocery store, and in the growing pile of bills stacking up on your kitchen counter. The Pentagon Has Never Passed an Audit This detail deserves its own moment of attention. More than half of the Pentagon’s budget goes directly to corporate military contractors. Defense industry executives have been collecting enormous compensation packages and issuing massive stock buybacks and dividends. Even Trump himself acknowledged this in a social media post, complaining that defense companies are not producing equipment fast enough. And yet the answer is to hand that same unaccountable institution more money? With no oversight structure in place? With Congress still tangled up in fights over last year’s spending bills? The Pentagon does not know where all its money goes. It has told you so, year after year, by failing the most basic financial review that every other federal agency must pass. And now the president is asking you to trust it with 4.5 percent of the nation’s entire economic output. Who Benefits From This? Follow the money. Defense contractor stocks surge every time this war escalates. Lockheed Martin gets more F 35 orders. Shipbuilders get new submarine contracts. The “Golden Dome” missile defense system, a $185 billion project that critics have questioned from the start, gets its full funding. People playing the stock market and prediction platforms are also apparently benefiting.¹ And who loses? You do. Your family does. The teacher who gets told her training is “indoctrination.” The senior citizen whose Medicaid gets restructured into something she cannot navigate. The veteran who served this country and comes home to find the social safety net he was promised has been traded in for another round of bombs. This budget tells you exactly where this administration’s priorities are. And those priorities are not you. The Constitution Is Not a Suggestion The framers of this country put the war power in the hands of Congress for a reason. They knew the danger of a single executive dragging a nation into conflict for personal, political, or ideological reasons. They designed a system where the people’s representatives would debate, deliberate, and decide before American blood was spilled. Trump bypassed all of that. He launched a war of choice. He killed a foreign leader. He deployed thousands of service members into harm’s way. And the only reason Congress has not stopped him is because enough members of his own party chose loyalty to a president over fidelity to the document they swore an oath to defend. The War Powers Act gives Congress 60 days to assert itself. That clock is ticking. And the administration is racing to make this war so large, so expensive, and so entrenched that reversing course becomes politically impossible. That is not strategy. That is a trap. And you are the one sitting in it. What You Need to Do Right Now This is the moment where you decide what kind of country you want to live in. One that spends $1 billion a day dropping bombs on the other side of the world without your consent. Or one that invests in your family, your community, and your future. You have a voice. You have a vote. And the 2026 midterm elections are coming. Call your representative. Call your senator. Tell them you do not support a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget that adds trillions to the debt your children and grandchildren will inherit. Tell them you do not support a war that was started without congressional authorization and has no defined end. Tell them you want your tax dollars spent on health care, housing, education, clean energy, and food security. Tell them you read the Constitution. And you expect them to follow it. Every dollar spent on this war is a dollar stolen from your community. Every day this conflict continues without a vote in Congress is a day your democracy erodes a little further. Every time the administration tells you it cannot afford to care for your family, remember that it found $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon in a heartbeat. This is your money. This is your country. And this is your fight. Do not sit this one out. Mitch Jackson, Esq. (on LinkedIn)