How the Arms Industry is Robbing the Working Class of a Better Life
A Conversation with Stephen Semler
This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s Substack We Can Do Better: Ending Poverty in Our Time on June 18, 2026.
Stephen Semler is a self-described “producer of charts & policy analysis for the working class.”
As the author of the newsletter Polygraph and a co-founder of the Security Policy Reform Institute, Stephen is the best there is at explaining how the arms industry has used piles of campaign money to take over U.S. budgets via Congress and Presidential administrations, and the price we all pay for this domination.
You can listen to the episode here:
Simply put, we can end poverty by slashing U.S. war spending. Now at over $1 trillion annually, the U.S. spends more on the war industry than the next nine highest-spending countries combined.
If there was any question that we spend this breathtaking sum at the cost of social needs, President Trump recently put that doubt to rest. “We’re fighting wars,” Trump said. “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things…we have to take care of one thing: military protection.
In this episode, we talk with Stephen about his journey from a short stint as an arms industry lobbyist himself to now writing amazing articles like, What $1.5 Trillion for the Pentagon Could Fund Instead.
Stephen found that those funds could:
Eliminate global hunger and extreme poverty
End homelessness in the U.S.
Provide Medicaid for all persons in the U.S. without health insurance
Implement universal pre-K for three- and four-year olds
Issue $600 checks to 235 million Americans
Build enough solar infrastructure to power half of all U.S. households.
Even all that wonderful work put together could not cover the U.S. war budget, Stephen tells us. He had $77 billion left over!
Polls show there is strong public support in the U.S. for dramatically reducing our war spending. There is wisdom in that crowd. Stephen proves that the basic math is clear: we can trade missiles and bombers for housing and food, and we should.
