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It's not about our "standard of living", it's more about class mobilization. If you were born poor, you could still get a job at McDonalds, go to college on tho
by sodkmfkwegw 4y ago
It's not about our "standard of living", it's more about class mobilization. If you were born poor, you could still get a job at McDonalds, go to college on those wages, and buy a home/start a family and live middle class easily, if not upper-middle class if you chose a high-earnings potential career.
Today, that's close to impossible unless you take student loans, go through the gauntlet of getting a higher paying job, and then have to grapple with home prices assuming you don't live in a place with reasonably affordable home ownership.
If you think the DMV and government offices are "make-work" then we need to start with cutting military spending because it's the biggest "make-work" government program we have that the vast majority of U.S. spending goes to.
- wrycoder 4y agoThat's way off. The US spends 12% on the military.[0] [0] https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown-3305789#toc-spending https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...
- sodkmfkwegw 4y agoSorry about that, I meant to write "discretionary" in there. Regardless, the point of spending less on the military still stands. We can't change mandatory spending or we have millions of elderly people dying because social security vanishes into thin air.
- wrycoder 4y agoWell, I paid into SS and Medicare for fifty years, and I’m getting less out than I put in. But, still glad to have them. Some people call it a Ponzi scheme, but it’s a pool, as designed. The military is a big jobs program and all the industrial support generates a lot of economic activity. Better if they just dropped it in the ocean, though. Too much temptation to test it.
- sodkmfkwegw 4y agoSounds like you know the difference between the two programs then.