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> "federal" and "discretionary" are weasel qualifiers that attempt to make military spending look artificially large[...] It's not just a weasel qualifier. The

by avar 8y ago

> "federal" and "discretionary" are weasel qualifiers that attempt to make military spending look artificially large[...] It's not just a weasel qualifier. There is mandatory military spending in the US, e.g. pensions paid to retired members of the military. Considering pensions paid to veterans a part of military spending is the norm, e.g. NATO's % GDP numbers take that into account for all its members. > For one thing, defense is one of the relatively few things the federal government is supposed to be doing[..] Sure, but the extent to which it does it is largely discretionary. It's mostly a political decision to keep spending more today as a percentage of GDP than the US was doing in the 1930s[1], or to name an example closer to the current day more than was being spent on September 10th, 2001. 1. https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1792_2010USp_11s1lo011lcn_30f https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1792_201...

rayiner 8y ago
> It's not just a weasel qualifier. There is mandatory military spending in the US, e.g. pensions paid to retired members of the military. So? When you're talking about how the military budget is too big, how does it make sense to exclude all the mandatory social spending from the calculation? > Sure, but the extent to which it does it is largely discretionary. That's not the point. Because defense is one of the few things the federal government is supposed to do, looking only at the federal budget will always make defense spending seem artificially large. You see people say stuff like "the U.S. spends more on defense than education!" In fact, we spend more on K-12 alone than defense--it's just that the education spending shows up in the $3.5 trillion of non-federal spending. We spend almost as much on infrastructure as on the military, a fact that is again obscured if you're looking only at the federal budget.
- avar 8y ago
  I wasn't trying to refute your larger point that quoting some arbitrary part of a government's total % of GDP spending is mostly meaningless. I was saying that your claim that "discretionary" in "discretionary military spending" is a weasel qualifier is wrong, because that part of the budget is meaningfully broken down into discretionary and non-discretionary spending. You can decide to scale active military personnel up and down, you can't (as easily) decide to stop paying military pensions. > [...]defense is one of the few things the federal government is supposed to do[...] So you keep saying, but the upthread comment is clearly about how much is being spent on that topic. Just because there's a law saying a certain part of the government is entrusted with a given task doesn't mean it's not meaningful to discuss how much needs to be spent on that task.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    > I was saying that your claim that "discretionary" in "discretionary military spending" is a weasel qualifier is wrong In the above, the "discretionary" qualifier is being applied to "federal spending" not "military spending." > So you keep saying, but the upthread comment is clearly about how much is being spent on that topic. Just because there's a law saying a certain part of the government is entrusted with a given task doesn't mean it's not meaningful to discuss how much needs to be spent on that task. The upstream comment is arguing that too much is being spent on defense by pointing to defense spending being a high percentage of discretionary federal spending. It is meaningful to discuss whether too much is being spent on the military. But it's misleading to make that argument by pointing out that the part of the government that's meant to provide for defense (and little else) spends a large fraction of its budget on defense. It's like the statement that "44% of Americans pay no federal income tax." That statement is technically true, but calculated to mislead because it ignores that most of the total tax burden is not "federal income tax." Likewise, more than 80% of total governmental spending is not "federal discretionary spending."

by avar 8y ago

rayiner 8y ago

> It's not just a weasel qualifier. There is mandatory military spending in the US, e.g. pensions paid to retired members of the military. So? When you're talking about how the military budget is too big, how does it make sense to exclude all the mandatory social spending from the calculation? > Sure, but the extent to which it does it is largely discretionary. That's not the point. Because defense is one of the few things the federal government is supposed to do, looking only at the federal budget will always make defense spending seem artificially large. You see people say stuff like "the U.S. spends more on defense than education!" In fact, we spend more on K-12 alone than defense--it's just that the education spending shows up in the $3.5 trillion of non-federal spending. We spend almost as much on infrastructure as on the military, a fact that is again obscured if you're looking only at the federal budget.

avar 8y ago
I wasn't trying to refute your larger point that quoting some arbitrary part of a government's total % of GDP spending is mostly meaningless. I was saying that your claim that "discretionary" in "discretionary military spending" is a weasel qualifier is wrong, because that part of the budget is meaningfully broken down into discretionary and non-discretionary spending. You can decide to scale active military personnel up and down, you can't (as easily) decide to stop paying military pensions. > [...]defense is one of the few things the federal government is supposed to do[...] So you keep saying, but the upthread comment is clearly about how much is being spent on that topic. Just because there's a law saying a certain part of the government is entrusted with a given task doesn't mean it's not meaningful to discuss how much needs to be spent on that task.
- rayiner 8y ago
  > I was saying that your claim that "discretionary" in "discretionary military spending" is a weasel qualifier is wrong In the above, the "discretionary" qualifier is being applied to "federal spending" not "military spending." > So you keep saying, but the upthread comment is clearly about how much is being spent on that topic. Just because there's a law saying a certain part of the government is entrusted with a given task doesn't mean it's not meaningful to discuss how much needs to be spent on that task. The upstream comment is arguing that too much is being spent on defense by pointing to defense spending being a high percentage of discretionary federal spending. It is meaningful to discuss whether too much is being spent on the military. But it's misleading to make that argument by pointing out that the part of the government that's meant to provide for defense (and little else) spends a large fraction of its budget on defense. It's like the statement that "44% of Americans pay no federal income tax." That statement is technically true, but calculated to mislead because it ignores that most of the total tax burden is not "federal income tax." Likewise, more than 80% of total governmental spending is not "federal discretionary spending."