8 ms·

I think you'd make a stronger argument by instead of making a military or other things argument, and just make a 'fund other things more' argument. The reason

I think you'd make a stronger argument by instead of making a military or other things argument, and just make a 'fund other things more' argument. The reason I think you should stay away from pointing fingers, especially at a relatively divisive issue like military or especially aircraft carrier funding is because then you shift a question of "should American be world leading in commercial air travel regulation, pandemic prevention and control, and medical development" to a far more complex one of what America's role in the world should be. The combined CDC, FDA and FAA budget is something like 35 billion dollars a year. Overall DOD budget is is nearly 700 billion, making up nearly half of annual discretionary spending (roughly 1.5 trillion). You could literally double the funding of those three agencies and barely budge the overall calculus of the budget. Edit/Add-on: I think the whole sub-thread under my comment (my bad =/ - I get the irony...) is an example of the types of distractions that might be avoidable if you don't scope military spending into discussions.

ransom1538 6y ago
I love this "half of annual discretionary spending". It is designed to confuse the fact that military spending is only %15. [1] https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/the-facts-on-medicare-spending-and-financing/ https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/the-facts-on-medica...
- chmod775 6y ago
  I don't think spending more on military than the next 10 countries combined can be described as "only" in any way. The highest spender are the US, with $732.0 billion, followed by China with $261.0 billion, then India and Russia with $71.1 and $65.1 billion respectively.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Militaries are reliant on domestic production and labor. (Paying Chinese solider costs the government a fraction as much as an American soldier.) So instead of an exchange rate conversion, you should be doing a purchasing-power conversion. For these three countries, that means multiplying by 2x to 4x. Also, the US is particularly inefficient at capital spending. It costs us a billion dollars to build a mile of subway, and costs countries like France a fraction of that. So that weighs further in favor of discounting our spending in that comparison.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      The majority of DoD's budget is not salaries. Only the salaries should be scaled in this way. E.g. many other countries are buying our F-35s at the same price we are. Other countries simply can't get equally effective jet fighters, aircraft carriers, etc., at a third to a quarter of the price.
      - icegreentea2 6y ago
        You're correct, personnel costs is not the majority of DoD costs. However, their "pay and benefits" take up 40% of it's budget (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#For_personnel_payment_and_benefits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...) Procurement (the most visible part of the budget we hear about) is 20% of the DoD budget.
        samstave 6y ago
        Also, one needs to take into account Black Budgets - as they are totally opaque and we have no idea what amount of the budget they consume, assuming they are even accounted for in the 700 billion dollar number the budget claims to be.
        rayiner 6y ago
        The same is true for China and Russia.
        samstave 6y ago
        Ooohhh hey again, we havent comment threaded in like five years... how are you doing.
        rayiner 6y ago
        Hanging in thank you for asking.
      - deleted 6y ago
  - endogui 6y ago
    The US is filling the role of the Roman Empire, securing trade routes to allow efficient scales of tech expertise and production. If that military is scaled back or shown to be obsolete/ineffectual, then globalism itself will come into question. The dark ages were caused by the localizing of production, with local feifdoms losing access to specialized technical expertise. To some extent, this is what we see now with companies moving produuction back to North America.
    - Melting_Harps 6y ago
      > The US is filling the role of the Roman Empire Yeah, and look how that ended. In fact, its entirely apt cautionary tale because due to taxes and an ever increasing cost of living in Rome proper citizen-soldiers (during the Republic) often went bankrupt and fell into destitute while fighting campaigns from Rome's conquest and returned to see the oligarchy take their fields/land and displaced them further and further out of Rome. This is the story of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, direct descendants of Scipio Africanus (the illustrious Soldier and Savior of the Roman Republic) and the Land/Ag Plebeian reforms they achieved that cost them both their lives after several stints in Politics. It got to a point that due to land consolidation that it was less expensive to buy the wheat from Egypt, have it transported by boat, and used (often slave labour) to bake the bread then it was to buy a loaf locally. My old History professor went on an amazing rant about this for an hour in one of my Roman History courses when we were discussing the true costs of Imperial Expansion and what is often swept under the rug as a footnote in History, she was old but still pissed because they didn't let her include it in her book. The World now is ever more interconnected than ever, and one could argue why that is a horrible trade-off both for national security purposes but also for self-reliance reasons as we saw with the PPE shortage and the faulty equipment that came from China. But I fail to see how the West at least would abandon the critical supply chains they have developed in order for Society to function unless we have something like an asteroid collision. Even now the EU as well as Australia, and New Zealand are siding with the US' stance on punishing the CCP's Security Law in Hong Kong that is going to undo the relationship that served as an access point into China via a neutral party. Are you seriously suggesting that if the US empire scaled back its efforts in those regions then we'd return to the dark ages? Because when I was in Europe Somali pirates were hi-jacking oil tankers and the US didn't intervene, it took the European companies and military to put an end to that entirely by themselves without the need of US involvement. I think the US is headed for the same fate as Rome as it refuses to learn the same lessons, but if given the choice between China or the US as the Global Superpower I think its the latter that must retain its position as the former is hellbent on a suicidal mission that destroys everything in its path and will commit horrible acts of barbarism and won't hesitate to take the whole World down with it in its folly (see recent cases: Xianjing, Wuhan, Hong Kong and Beijing). I just hope we can attain a position where the World doesn't need superpowers and can return to at least a mutually beneficial city-state model as COVID has proven we cannot really overcome such huge issues like pandemics (or likely wide scale famines or global catastrophes) at such a scale. I mean governing 300+ million People is hard to conceptualize, but with Nation-States like China and India where it goes into the billions is just unfathomable and failure is the only real outcome in that. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODI1VOOoey0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODI1VOOoey0
- BoiledCabbage 6y ago
  If you're going to have a discussion about federal spending, it's important that you understand the difference between discretionary and non-discretionary spending and why both are relevant. As well as understand what spending expenses have revenue (ie taxes) tied to them and which ones don't. I'm not going to be proscriptive here and argue for either. But simply leave it at make sure you understand the key factors / attributes of income and spending beyond just a pie chart.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
The fact that "military" is a "divisive" issue proves the point of how we got to this point in the first place.
- addicted 6y ago
  Where did you get that the military is divisive? People are divided on the amount of funding the military should receive and whether or not it needs to continue growing.
- ethanbond 6y ago
  People are divided on what the US military‘s role in the world should be and how much money it should take to uphold that role. Sitting atop the longest stretch of global stability (largely enforced/maintained by the US military), it’s very hard to think clearly about what variables we can or should fiddle with.
  - bjlorenzen 6y ago
    The globe might feel stable while sitting inside the US and reading domestic media sources, but it sure hasn’t been easy for the dozens of countries we’ve been invading/occupying for the past decades.
    - Covzire 6y ago
      If we're making sweeping generalizations, then countries with stable benevolent governments who don't threaten their neighbors / the US and fund terrorism don't get invaded or occupied either. To be clear, I'm not saying every foreign policy action the US has undertaken in the last few decades has been superb.
      - pinkfoot 6y ago
        If we're making sweeping generalizations, then countries that don't project military power to prop up dodgy regimes and enforce their currency on major commodities don't get targetted by terrorist action. To be clear, I'm not saying every action that resistance organisations and foreign governments have taken in the last few decades has been superb. :) :)
chiefalchemist 6y ago
At nearly three-quarters of a trillion, the DoD budget is difficult to ignore. It had bipartisan support. It has not made us any safer. It's not fingerpointing. It's simply a perfect example of a system and priorities gone sideways. It's a 700 billion gorilla that continues to bloat because saying otherwise is considered to be unAmerican, etc. The narrative of not talking openly about the DOD budget needs to change.
- pinkfoot 6y ago
  Chalmers Johnson and Robert Higgs were making the case as long ago as 2006 that the actual US defence budget was obfuscated and was over a trillion dollars. They argue that if you add the budgets of the Department of Energy (nuclear research), the Department of Homeland Security, the defence-related programs of the the Department of State and international assistance programs (e.g. Israel, Egypt?), the Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA, the Department of the Treasury's military retirement costs (Military Retirement Fund) you can add 50% to the nominal defence budget. [1] https://mondediplo.com/2008/02/05military https://mondediplo.com/2008/02/05military [2] https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=1941 https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=1941
EGreg 6y ago
There is a huge disparity here that needs to be addressed. The Pentagon can’t pass an audit for decades, $7 Trillion just in the last 10 years unaccounted for. Yet we increased the annual military budget by $100B a year in 2018 alone. Meanwhile we say we can’t afford these other programs. If national security is a priority then why this mentality? Given such a mentality, the military should probably just subsume the CDC or something, just so the politicians can fund CDC as part of “the military”. The root cause though is this obsession with growing the largest fighting force and largest employer on the planet. We have 30x more bases than the rest of the world combined! The same people who say they want to see smaller government and hate central planning tell us to open our pocketbooks to keep giving more, more, more to continuously operate in 80 other countries. Then when we ask why can’t we have money for better education and healthcare to cover all our own citizens like European countries, they turn around and tell us the reason those countries can afford it is that we protect them. Well if that’s true, how is that America first, I wonder? Nothing makes sense.
mobilefriendly 6y ago
$35 billion is an EXTRAORDINARY amount of money. It's the economic output of Vermont, a state with 630,000 people.
- sutterbomb 6y ago
  the US is an EXTRAORDINARY large country. It has a population >500x greater than the state of Vermont, a state with 630,000 people.
  - oneplane 6y ago
    I wouldn't call it EXTRAORDINARY (especially not all-caps) when you know there are countries like Russia, Canada and China. The only extraordinary thing would be the wealth distribution vs market value of the USA.
    - sutterbomb 6y ago
      In context it should be very easy to see why I phrased things the way I did. I do not personally think there's anything EXTRAORDINARY about US population size OR the budget amounts in question.
- msrpotus 6y ago
  And the US as a whole is 500x the population of Vermont.
razorunreal 6y ago
It seems very relevant because the military was apparently completely unprepared for biological warfare. Like in all their talk of terrorism they hadn't even considered the possibility. Sure, this virus wasn't an intentional attack, but it easily could have been. How much good do all those weapons do when a virus can bring the country to a halt?

ransom1538 6y ago

I love this "half of annual discretionary spending". It is designed to confuse the fact that military spending is only %15. [1] https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/the-facts-on-medicare-spending-and-financing/ https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/the-facts-on-medica...

chmod775 6y ago
I don't think spending more on military than the next 10 countries combined can be described as "only" in any way. The highest spender are the US, with $732.0 billion, followed by China with $261.0 billion, then India and Russia with $71.1 and $65.1 billion respectively.
- rayiner 6y ago
  Militaries are reliant on domestic production and labor. (Paying Chinese solider costs the government a fraction as much as an American soldier.) So instead of an exchange rate conversion, you should be doing a purchasing-power conversion. For these three countries, that means multiplying by 2x to 4x. Also, the US is particularly inefficient at capital spending. It costs us a billion dollars to build a mile of subway, and costs countries like France a fraction of that. So that weighs further in favor of discounting our spending in that comparison.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    The majority of DoD's budget is not salaries. Only the salaries should be scaled in this way. E.g. many other countries are buying our F-35s at the same price we are. Other countries simply can't get equally effective jet fighters, aircraft carriers, etc., at a third to a quarter of the price.
    - icegreentea2 6y ago
      You're correct, personnel costs is not the majority of DoD costs. However, their "pay and benefits" take up 40% of it's budget (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States#For_personnel_payment_and_benefits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...) Procurement (the most visible part of the budget we hear about) is 20% of the DoD budget.
      - samstave 6y ago
        Also, one needs to take into account Black Budgets - as they are totally opaque and we have no idea what amount of the budget they consume, assuming they are even accounted for in the 700 billion dollar number the budget claims to be.
        rayiner 6y ago
        The same is true for China and Russia.
        samstave 6y ago
        Ooohhh hey again, we havent comment threaded in like five years... how are you doing.
        rayiner 6y ago
        Hanging in thank you for asking.
    - deleted 6y ago
- endogui 6y ago
  The US is filling the role of the Roman Empire, securing trade routes to allow efficient scales of tech expertise and production. If that military is scaled back or shown to be obsolete/ineffectual, then globalism itself will come into question. The dark ages were caused by the localizing of production, with local feifdoms losing access to specialized technical expertise. To some extent, this is what we see now with companies moving produuction back to North America.
  - Melting_Harps 6y ago
    > The US is filling the role of the Roman Empire Yeah, and look how that ended. In fact, its entirely apt cautionary tale because due to taxes and an ever increasing cost of living in Rome proper citizen-soldiers (during the Republic) often went bankrupt and fell into destitute while fighting campaigns from Rome's conquest and returned to see the oligarchy take their fields/land and displaced them further and further out of Rome. This is the story of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, direct descendants of Scipio Africanus (the illustrious Soldier and Savior of the Roman Republic) and the Land/Ag Plebeian reforms they achieved that cost them both their lives after several stints in Politics. It got to a point that due to land consolidation that it was less expensive to buy the wheat from Egypt, have it transported by boat, and used (often slave labour) to bake the bread then it was to buy a loaf locally. My old History professor went on an amazing rant about this for an hour in one of my Roman History courses when we were discussing the true costs of Imperial Expansion and what is often swept under the rug as a footnote in History, she was old but still pissed because they didn't let her include it in her book. The World now is ever more interconnected than ever, and one could argue why that is a horrible trade-off both for national security purposes but also for self-reliance reasons as we saw with the PPE shortage and the faulty equipment that came from China. But I fail to see how the West at least would abandon the critical supply chains they have developed in order for Society to function unless we have something like an asteroid collision. Even now the EU as well as Australia, and New Zealand are siding with the US' stance on punishing the CCP's Security Law in Hong Kong that is going to undo the relationship that served as an access point into China via a neutral party. Are you seriously suggesting that if the US empire scaled back its efforts in those regions then we'd return to the dark ages? Because when I was in Europe Somali pirates were hi-jacking oil tankers and the US didn't intervene, it took the European companies and military to put an end to that entirely by themselves without the need of US involvement. I think the US is headed for the same fate as Rome as it refuses to learn the same lessons, but if given the choice between China or the US as the Global Superpower I think its the latter that must retain its position as the former is hellbent on a suicidal mission that destroys everything in its path and will commit horrible acts of barbarism and won't hesitate to take the whole World down with it in its folly (see recent cases: Xianjing, Wuhan, Hong Kong and Beijing). I just hope we can attain a position where the World doesn't need superpowers and can return to at least a mutually beneficial city-state model as COVID has proven we cannot really overcome such huge issues like pandemics (or likely wide scale famines or global catastrophes) at such a scale. I mean governing 300+ million People is hard to conceptualize, but with Nation-States like China and India where it goes into the billions is just unfathomable and failure is the only real outcome in that. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODI1VOOoey0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODI1VOOoey0
BoiledCabbage 6y ago
If you're going to have a discussion about federal spending, it's important that you understand the difference between discretionary and non-discretionary spending and why both are relevant. As well as understand what spending expenses have revenue (ie taxes) tied to them and which ones don't. I'm not going to be proscriptive here and argue for either. But simply leave it at make sure you understand the key factors / attributes of income and spending beyond just a pie chart.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago

The fact that "military" is a "divisive" issue proves the point of how we got to this point in the first place.

addicted 6y ago
Where did you get that the military is divisive? People are divided on the amount of funding the military should receive and whether or not it needs to continue growing.
ethanbond 6y ago
People are divided on what the US military‘s role in the world should be and how much money it should take to uphold that role. Sitting atop the longest stretch of global stability (largely enforced/maintained by the US military), it’s very hard to think clearly about what variables we can or should fiddle with.
- bjlorenzen 6y ago
  The globe might feel stable while sitting inside the US and reading domestic media sources, but it sure hasn’t been easy for the dozens of countries we’ve been invading/occupying for the past decades.
  - Covzire 6y ago
    If we're making sweeping generalizations, then countries with stable benevolent governments who don't threaten their neighbors / the US and fund terrorism don't get invaded or occupied either. To be clear, I'm not saying every foreign policy action the US has undertaken in the last few decades has been superb.
    - pinkfoot 6y ago
      If we're making sweeping generalizations, then countries that don't project military power to prop up dodgy regimes and enforce their currency on major commodities don't get targetted by terrorist action. To be clear, I'm not saying every action that resistance organisations and foreign governments have taken in the last few decades has been superb. :) :)

chiefalchemist 6y ago

At nearly three-quarters of a trillion, the DoD budget is difficult to ignore. It had bipartisan support. It has not made us any safer. It's not fingerpointing. It's simply a perfect example of a system and priorities gone sideways. It's a 700 billion gorilla that continues to bloat because saying otherwise is considered to be unAmerican, etc. The narrative of not talking openly about the DOD budget needs to change.

pinkfoot 6y ago
Chalmers Johnson and Robert Higgs were making the case as long ago as 2006 that the actual US defence budget was obfuscated and was over a trillion dollars. They argue that if you add the budgets of the Department of Energy (nuclear research), the Department of Homeland Security, the defence-related programs of the the Department of State and international assistance programs (e.g. Israel, Egypt?), the Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA, the Department of the Treasury's military retirement costs (Military Retirement Fund) you can add 50% to the nominal defence budget. [1] https://mondediplo.com/2008/02/05military https://mondediplo.com/2008/02/05military [2] https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=1941 https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=1941

EGreg 6y ago

There is a huge disparity here that needs to be addressed. The Pentagon can’t pass an audit for decades, $7 Trillion just in the last 10 years unaccounted for. Yet we increased the annual military budget by $100B a year in 2018 alone. Meanwhile we say we can’t afford these other programs. If national security is a priority then why this mentality? Given such a mentality, the military should probably just subsume the CDC or something, just so the politicians can fund CDC as part of “the military”. The root cause though is this obsession with growing the largest fighting force and largest employer on the planet. We have 30x more bases than the rest of the world combined! The same people who say they want to see smaller government and hate central planning tell us to open our pocketbooks to keep giving more, more, more to continuously operate in 80 other countries. Then when we ask why can’t we have money for better education and healthcare to cover all our own citizens like European countries, they turn around and tell us the reason those countries can afford it is that we protect them. Well if that’s true, how is that America first, I wonder? Nothing makes sense.

mobilefriendly 6y ago

$35 billion is an EXTRAORDINARY amount of money. It's the economic output of Vermont, a state with 630,000 people.

sutterbomb 6y ago
the US is an EXTRAORDINARY large country. It has a population >500x greater than the state of Vermont, a state with 630,000 people.
- oneplane 6y ago
  I wouldn't call it EXTRAORDINARY (especially not all-caps) when you know there are countries like Russia, Canada and China. The only extraordinary thing would be the wealth distribution vs market value of the USA.
  - sutterbomb 6y ago
    In context it should be very easy to see why I phrased things the way I did. I do not personally think there's anything EXTRAORDINARY about US population size OR the budget amounts in question.
msrpotus 6y ago
And the US as a whole is 500x the population of Vermont.

razorunreal 6y ago

It seems very relevant because the military was apparently completely unprepared for biological warfare. Like in all their talk of terrorism they hadn't even considered the possibility. Sure, this virus wasn't an intentional attack, but it easily could have been. How much good do all those weapons do when a virus can bring the country to a halt?