8 ms·
"No good reason" is subjective. Was there any reason given? Looked at the article, but didn't see any. Perhaps it was cost? Does the Pentagon budget break out
by natcombs 6y ago
"No good reason" is subjective. Was there any reason given?
Looked at the article, but didn't see any. Perhaps it was cost? Does the Pentagon budget break out the cost of Stars & Stripes?
- Lev1a 6y ago> Looked at the article, but didn't see any. Perhaps it was cost? Does the Pentagon budget break out the cost of Stars & Stripes? From the article: > The eagerness to kill Stars and Stripes is hard to fathom. As the senators note in their letter to Esper, the $15.5 million saved by eliminating the newspaper’s subsidy would have a “negligible impact” on the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget. That's 0.0022% of the Pentagons budget, i.e. essentially nothing.
- ahelwer 6y agoThe average American pays about $10k in federal income taxes each year. Assuming they do this for fifty years, this means the average American might pay $500k in federal income taxes over their lifetime. So this propaganda rag consumed the lifelong social contributions of 31 people, every year. It isn't nothing.
- elliekelly 6y ago> The average American pays about $10k in federal income taxes each year. Do you have a source for this? There is absolutely no way this is true. Are you including Social Security contributions as "federal income tax"? Or maybe did you mean the average American household pays $10k each year?
- ahelwer 6y agoHere you go: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2017/10/07/a-foolish-take-how-much-does-the-average-american-pay-in-taxes/106237216/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2017/10... Say it's about $10k for federal, for ease of calculation. If it's less, then that means even more people's lifelong contributions are incinerated by a propaganda rag.
- elliekelly 6y ago> According to a recent survey of nearly 130,000 American consumers, the average American spends $10,489 each year in federal, state, and local income taxes.
- ahelwer 6y agoI really don't know what you're arguing about here. To repeat myself, if I overestimated how much they paid, then it's even more people whose contributions are incinerated. Yay for my original point I guess?
- eesmith 6y agoI think the argument is that simple numbers don't really mean much, especially when misrepresented. If you have an point to make, it should be correct. https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/revenues/ https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud... says that payroll taxes and corporate income tax (in 2015) together are about the same contribution to federal income as individual income taxes, which puts a factor of 2 the other way in your estimate.
- elliekelly 6y agoI'm not arguing, that number just seemed shockingly high to me so I suspected it was overstated. It was. That's all.
- valuearb 6y agoThe “average” American doesn’t pay federal income taxes. Only 47% do.
- mikestew 6y agoThe average American also has 2.3 kids. Are you going to counter-argue that no one has three tenths of a child?
- Bud 6y agoI'm not sure you are parsing what "average" means.
- valuearb 6y agoIt was just a (innacurate) turn of phrase. A better way of saying it only 47% of Americans paying federal taxes contribute to Stars and Stripes.
- liability 6y agoMedian seems as valid an 'average' as mean.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago"average" usually means "mode" or "median" when used as "average person". The meaning can be inferred from context or clarified. "Mean" is almost never correct for distributions that aren't near uniform, and never correct for distributions that aren't even near normal and not near symmetric.
- rjmunro 6y ago31 people's tax is nothing in a country of 328,000,000 people. Even 1500 people's tax every year, which sounds worse, is still nothing.
- ahelwer 6y agoNo, it isn't nothing. My point is you can't wave away these numbers just by putting them next to a much larger number. These bills ultimately have to be paid, and asking whether a propaganda rag is worth >31 people's lifelong tax contributions every year is a much better framing than "we already incinerate cash, what's a bit more" - that is just utterly terrible reasoning. Try applying it to your own budget and see where that gets you at the end of the month. Things add up quickly.
- qqqwerty 6y agoIt is nothing. For example, it is the equivalent of me budgeting for a single cup of coffee for the entire year. The administrative costs of removing that expense would dwarf the expense itself, and could actually result in significantly negative ROI when accounting for opportunity cost (hundreds, if not thousands of alternative opportunities to save more money are being ignored while leadership focuses on this one).
- ahelwer 6y agoLeadership isn't interested in cutting military funding generally, so there is no opportunity cost here. I very much doubt there are administrative costs that exceed $15.5 million, certainly not for the next several years. Maybe if democrats decide to turn it into a political football for reasons that make sense only to the liberal mind.
- aaron695 6y ago> That's 0.0022% of the Pentagons budget, i.e. essentially nothing. This is the wrong way to think of it. It's either a positive use of money or negative. But on top of that simplicity, Ryan Air for instance asks employees to steal pens from hotels. They are extremists, but they run some savings that would be so silly they are negative to create a culture. This however seems political. Someone is trying to make someone else look bad.
- nodefortytwo 6y ago"The eagerness to kill Stars and Stripes is hard to fathom. As the senators note in their letter to Esper, the $15.5 million saved by eliminating the newspaper’s subsidy would have a “negligible impact” on the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget."
- jdhn 6y agoI'm OK with cutting $15.5 million from the military budget. Sure, it's a drop in the ocean, but any savings we can wring out of the military is a good thing.
- itomato 6y agoNot with you on that one. Soldiers and their families are, were rather, represented in print. Not any more. What's that worth?
- everybodyknows 6y agoNon-government military news sites that regularly expose failures of the system, injustices to those in service: https://www.military.com/ https://www.military.com/ https://www.militarytimes.com/ https://www.militarytimes.com/
- krapp 6y agoNo more or less than any other demographic. If it's that important, someone can put up a website or find another publisher or something.
- colejohnson66 6y agoNot saying whether this is a good idea or not, but soldiers on the front lines don’t always have internet, and, as such, can’t access internet news.
- krapp 6y ago
- mcot2 6y agoThe answer is so obvious it doesn’t require this pedantic exercise.
- mcintyre1994 6y agoFrom the article it sounds like the cost is $15.5m? > The memo ordering the publication’s dissolution claims the administration has the authority to make this move under the president’s fiscal year 2021 defense department budget request. It zeroed out the $15.5 million annual subsidy for Stars and Stripes. > The eagerness to kill Stars and Stripes is hard to fathom. As the senators note in their letter to Esper, the $15.5 million saved by eliminating the newspaper’s subsidy would have a “negligible impact” on the Pentagon’s $700 billion budget.
- strombye 6y agoAnd you’re gonna fall for that as the reason? And just ignore the administration’s long running campaign to undermine journalists Whenever possible?
- pwinnski 6y agoI think this is a case in which words don't properly convey the scale at hand. $15.5 million and $700 billion might better be said as $15.5 million and $700,000.0 million.
- stanfordkid 6y agoThe military budget is $700 billion, as stated in the article. They probably spend more than $15mm on toilet paper for a single Airforce base.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoLet's say you need to clean out your garage. It's piled full of stuff and it's going to take you a while to clean up. Do you first reach for the biggest thing in the bottom of the pile, or do you grab the small stuff on top that's closest to you first?
- klyrs 6y agoOnly, you're not cleaning a garage, you're a tin-pot dictator and you control the budget of a newspaper which has recently covered a narrative that you don't like.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoThe article did not mention that they covered a narrative that Trump disliked. Where did you get that from?
- matt_kantor 6y ago> https://www.stripes.com/news/us/trump-denies-reports-that-he-disparaged-us-war-dead-as-losers-suckers-1.643839 https://www.stripes.com/news/us/trump-denies-reports-that-he... > A few days ago they also ran a story about a poll showing Trump lagging Biden among the military. Thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24375564
- liability 6y agoIt may well be retaliatory, but not for that specific article/poll. The Trump administration proposed defunding Stars and Stripes back in February. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/the-stars-and-stripes-newspaper-has-long-supported-the-troops-now-it-needs-congresss-support/2020/06/18/10046b92-8982-11ea-8ac1-bfb250876b7a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/the-stars-... > In February, the Trump administration proposed eliminating all of the publication’s federal support in 2021. That’s more than $15 million a year, about half its budget. “I can’t think of a graver threat to its independence,” the paper’s ombudsman, Ernie Gates, told me recently. “That’s a fatal cut.”
- brmgb 6y ago> Looked at the article, but didn't see any > Does the Pentagon budget break out the cost of Stars & Stripes? The answer to this question is in the eighth paragraph of the article, right before the discussion on how congress actually refunded the publication, the decision now resting with the senate and how the Pentagon ordered it to shutdown anyway which is unusual. I will hasard that when you said you looked at the article it was to be taken literally and didn't imply that you actually read it.
- moate 6y agoNo reason is given, so there is “no good reason”. There technically isn’t a bad reason. The implied reason is “because its funding wasn’t included in the (non-binding) presidential budget proposal “
- snowwrestler 6y agoBy cutting Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon will finally afford to add a few more developers to the lean-and-mean F-35 program, which is sure to speed up the software delivery. Smart management.
- standardUser 6y ago"Perhaps it was cost?" I hope we all got a good laugh over the idea that the Pentagon would ever be concerned with costs on the scale!