Yeah agreed. It's a shame though isn't it. Imagine a world where hundreds of billions of US defense spending could go into public services like free healthcare.
The problem isn't defense spending, the problem is resource misallocation, fraud and waste. The US is at the top of the healthcare expenditure per capita comparison by far [1] - there is enough money "in the system", it just ends up at the completely wrong places.
The US spends almost double as much money per citizen as countries as Germany, and yet, the quality of healthcare and accessibility are so much better here than the horror stories that regularly pop up here or on Reddit. Not to say our system is perfect - it's far from what I would consider to be decent - but the objective measurements of how the US' health care system performs are speaking clear and loud [2].
Sure, but just consider how many billions (trillions when we consider global spending?) of dollars are spent on either ways to kill other humans, or ways to defend from other people killing humans. What an amazing civilization we might be able to be, hundreds of years beyond our current level, if we could put that money toward literally anything else.
Yes, the grandparent mentioned health care, but there's a lot more that's possible. And hell, even if no one fixed the health care system in the US such that spending could go down to reasonable levels, I'd still imagine we could have free -- if expensive -- health care for all if we didn't have to allocate so much money to the military.
But that's not the world we live in; military preparedness is an absolute necessity.
Indeed, I agree with you on this and also read this report recently. But I think we're going down a bit of a rabbit hole here. My initial post was merely a comment on the unfortunate human condition currently, with the undertone of my desire that it shouldn't be this way.
