2% Doesn’t Sound Like Much, Right? Welcome to New World of Warlighting.

What is Warlighting?

We know all about gaslighting. This is a device used by carbon-producing companies to manipulate the general public into thinking oil and gas are good for us.

Now I humbly introduce the word ‘warlighting‘.

A loose definition would be ‘making taxpayers of the world think numbers like a measly TWO PERCENT is nothing but a few pennies’.

It’s just TWO PERCENT. It’s nothing.

But it’s not nothing.

Spending two percent of our Gross Domestic Product is like saying there’s a TWO PERCENT tax on EVERY SINGLE THING WE DO IN CANADA (which is what GDP measures).

It’s an unrealistic number and it’s unethical to tolerate the bullies of the world trying to force us to these ridiculous levels of spending.

Defence spending – especially when you add up military, operations, personnel, surveillance, hardware, multi-level government operations, emergency response and more – consumes the LARGEST percent of annual government spending in Canada and substantially more for other countries.

In Canada, in 2022, defence spending represented the largest component of our budget and when you add in all of the other elements related to defence and security (see above), my guess is that this number creeps up closer to $35-40 billion PER YEAR. For example, what’s ‘Public Safety’ but another word for military and suveillance:

Public Safety Canada develops policy, legislation and programs to support Canada’s capacity to respond to a range of national security threats directed against Canadians, our critical infrastructure and our cyber systems while advancing national counter terrorism efforts. – Department of Public Safety Canada.

Global Affairs, Science and Tech and Veterans Affairs all have allocations related to the military and surveillance as well.

Percent of Budget Matters Most

As you look at the details and discover that as a PERCENT OF OUR TOTAL ANNUAL BUDGET, defence and surveillance spending and all of the other dollars spent on non-civilian activities probably amount to about 20% of our total annual spending levels.

If we DIDN’T have military spending, we wouldn’t be adding to our annual deficits.

That’s a LOT of coin.

What About Other NATO Countries?

In addition to looking at these expenditures on a per-department basis and within the context of the annual budget (NOT GDP), Canada actually fares well compared to other NATO members:

Frankly, I’m with Iceland. They realized a while ago that the military madness sham is … a sham.

Anyways, as you can see from the chart above, Canada is below the beloved two-percent level, but so are NINETEEN other countries. The only true outliers are the US and the UK, both of which just can’t help themselves when it comes to loading up on guns and ammo.

What About Russia?

What about Russia?

If the hundreds of Western companies stopped paying taxes to Russian coffers and supplying them with ammo as well, we wouldn’t be in this mess, would we?

We need to boycott anyone doing business with the aggressors our there, including Russia and even China.

But that’s going to happen is it, because this ultimately comes down to getting lots of cheap shit from places like China, so yeah, we’ll all collectively whine a little and pay up when the thugs come to fleece our savings.

What Are Our Options?

Here’s what I propose: a TWO PERCENT OF GDP to be spent on the arts and climate change initiatives.

I want a MINIMUM $50 billion per year spent on both.

Per year.

Until the planet is cleaner and people calm the f&ck down.