March 05, 2024 10:20 AM UTC

"Skin" DeGraaf Turns Aerospace Day Into Morally Impoverished Farce

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• by: Colorado Pols

Today is Aerospace Day at the Colorado State Capitol, and some of the major defense and space exploration companies with Colorado ties are in the building today handing out cool swag like the United Launch Alliance’s “REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT” keychains and general goodwill on behalf of the economically significant military-space-industrial complex.

Not surprisingly, some left-leaning representatives took the opportunity to call for public funds to be spent on more productive things than the means to blow people up. In response, GOP Rep. Ken “Skin” DeGraaf took to the floor of the House to defend the defense industry’s sacred honor. And although DeGraaf surely thought this went well for him…it did not:

DEGRAAF: So I do appreciate my colleagues bringing up the fact that we should be more scrupulous with any, any funds that we, we spend. But if you do want to, if you want to compare apples and oranges, we need to look at Big Military compared to Big Poverty. Because Big Poverty is outspending Big Military. Big Military at least has some bang for the buck to show for it.

For those who don’t know, in addition to anchoring the far right of the Colorado House Republican micro-minority, Rep. DeGraaf is an Air Force Reserve pilot with many years on the government payroll. Because Republicans’ long-standing objective to get government down to the size where it can be “drowned in a bathtub” has always included an unspoken exception for spending unlimited sums on the military, it’s necessary for pro-military conservatives to differentiate between “big government” spending on the military versus social programs like Medicare and Social Security that alleviate poverty.

But there’s a reason most conservatives shy away from defending America’s giant and often spectacularly wasteful military budget by comparing it to the institutions generations of Americans have come to rely on. For most Americans, there’s no comparison. Ask them to choose between their Social Security benefits and a few more F-35 fighters, and the answer will be overwhelming and one-sided.

In “Big Military’s” case, like DeGraaf says, there’s some literal “bang” to show for the massive expense. It’s true that the “bang” Medicare and Social Security is less easy to obvserve than an explosion, since the principal result of these programs is keeping people alive. Every year that Democrats fight off attempts to cut these institutions, imperfect and costly though they may be, results in thousands of people literally remaining alive versus not. To suggest that these programs have no value simply because they don’t feature pyrotechnics is…

Honestly, it’s exactly what we’d expect from Ken DeGraaf.