6 ms·

Even more sad that the US chose NOT to invest this surplus, for instance in infrastructure, education and a sensible health system.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
The surplus came with alot of responsibilities, like policing the world. And that had a hefty price tag... nearly $1 trillion annually. Wasn't much left over for public transit and free foot massages. I can entertain arguments that it was a bad bargain.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  IMHO that's a false dichotomy. The US has the worlds most inefficient health system, which is an incredibly large budget post, most of the money going to middlemen. Besides, it has also benefited from open shipping lanes as much as the rest of the world, if not more.
- triceratops 1y ago
  "Policing the world" doesn't have to cost that much. Nearly $2tn spent just on the pointless Iraq misadventure. How much public transit and education could that have funded?
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    > How much public transit and education could that have funded? Given the current costs for NYC to expand its subway, about 500 miles of track given the current costs per mile.
    - actionfromafar 1y ago
      That sounds great actually.
    - triceratops 1y ago
      The entire NYC subway, the busiest system in the country, has 660 miles of track. NYC has a GDP of $1.3tn and the subway system has a big hand in making that possible. So that's actually a pretty good RoI. It'll go a lot further (haha!) in a less expensive city. But that also goes back to the original comment about spending the surplus wisely.
  - rangestransform 1y ago
    Policing the world is a jobs program for all of the unionized factory workers at lockmart and Boeing that would otherwise be, at best, trades workers earning a more modest wage. We can thank the MIC’s placement of factories in strategic congressional districts for that
- wpm 1y ago
  There is plenty to pay for public transit, education, and healthcare. There always has been, locked away in stock market value owned by precious few people. On healthcare, we already pay way more than any other developed nation for far worse outcomes, we're literally WASTING money on it to make some shitheel health insurance CEOs a little richer. FOH with this woe is us bullshit, boo hoo it's so hard to police the world (something we also overpay for). We could have been taking care of each other the entire time, there is nothing stopping us but lies and attitudes like yours the lies beget.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    >health insurance CEOs a little richer. To be honest, I don't even think it's just the people at the top profiting. The whole system is like designed to create as many useless jobs as possible. If I want to get a blood test, I have to do like 4-5 referrals before I can just get my test done. If I want a diagnosis, I have to wait a week to talk with a doctor who is going to push sponsored medication anyways. I'm better off doing the research myself and buying drugs through telehealth service or the greymarket. You would be better off just having a free market where consumers figure out what doctors/nurses/pharmaceuticals are safe on their own, and you strip intellectual property protections and legal requirements for prescription drugs. It shouldn't cost a million dollars to get an x-ray. It does because there are high legal barriers that allow rent-seekers to creep in.
- atoav 1y ago
  Yeah, only that if you spend more per capita on health care than comparable national, not less. So the argument of "We can't do $A like other countries do, because of $B" doesn't really fly if you spend more to get a worse outcome. The problem the US has in regards to healthcare, that the goal of its system isn't to supply its population with the best quality healthcare for the lowest amount of cost — the goal instead is to allow all kind of market actors and middle man to make a profit without the population revolting.
- fatbird 1y ago
  That $1T isn't an expense. Part of it is operational, meaning keepiong boats and bases running around the world, which earns the US yet more influence and soft power and unearned media. Much of it is acquisition costs, meaning $ going into a US defense tech for research and procurement of the most advanced hardware and maintenance of those industrial bases to do so; that hardware then gets sold to allies, among other things. Saudi Arabie just purchased $142 billion of US hardware. Playing "world cop" is a net win for America, not a cost it bears.
  - s1artibartfast 1y ago
    Just because there is a soft power upside does not mean that it is a net positive. I often see this stated without any form of quantification. It is essentially a matter of faith.
    - beeflet 1y ago
      The net upside is maintaining the market that allows for a trade deficit in the first place. The problem is really that the two aren't directly linked. If you operate at a trade deficit, you don't need to manufacture at home. But if you can't manufacture at home, you can't build war machines efficiently, so you can't be the world police and ensure the market needed to operate at a trade deficit. By defunding the military you're pulling the rug out from under yourself in this sense. I would still agree that it's massively inefficient and needs to be fixed, but the working US-World system would still invest a lot of funding into the military.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
        Unfortunately, at some point the people who are trading products for dollar bills will catch on that there's nothing that they can buy with the dollar bills that are worth the value of the products they sent across the ocean. When that happens, people will stop accepting the dollar bills as payment... but by that point, you've hollowed out your manufacturing to such a degree that you can't ever start it back up. So you can't trade for those products (no products of your own to trade), you can't purchase them (your own currency is worthless), You can't purchase them with other nations' currencies (nothing to sell for that), and you can't make the products yourself. But "soft power". We traded long term prosperity for the short term ability to meddle in other people's countries and lives.
rcpt 1y ago
Car infrastructure and sprawl is hugely expensive and we spend tons on it
- rangestransform 1y ago
  Even alon levy disagrees that maintaining suburban infrastructure is a huge driver of spending https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-about-urbanism/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-...
  - rcpt 1y ago
    "Even alon levy" is worded to sound like "all the experts" but if you read the article it's clear that he's taking a minority opinion. And that's because he's wrong. The US spends huge amounts on car infrastructure. At every level of government numbers are just gigantic.
jandrewrogers 1y ago
The US spends $1T on education. It is extremely difficult to justify spending more when the US already spends far more per student than other developed countries. Same with infrastructure and healthcare. Without accountability for where that money went it would be foolish to throw even more money at it. Also, in the US, infrastructure, education, and healthcare is primarily the responsibility of individual States, so it really needs to be measured on a per State basis. For some of these things, some States deliver high quality at low cost and other States deliver low quality with an order of magnitude higher spending for the same thing. The correlation between spending and results is surprisingly weak. Competency and focus seems to play a greater role.
- Vicarium 1y ago
  Its never competency and focus. Individual influence averages out, its the system that creates the result at scale. To some extent higher per-student fees are expected in certain areas, most countries with heavily funded education aren't facing the same issues of rural population density. There's a lot of overhead costs to run so many schools. Then state policies and regulatory capture is the other side of course, all schools need X teaching aid from Y company for some obscene markup...
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    The system can’t do anything if academics and discipline aren’t instilled at home.
    - kiitos 1y ago
      The 1800s called and they want their moral standards back.
  - nradov 1y ago
    Rural population density isn't a real problem for education. Some rural school districts have to run longer bus routes to service their students but those aren't particularly expensive.
- 1y ago
mousethatroared 1y ago
The US spends, per capita, more public funds on education and health care than any other industrialized nation in the world. Some of the worse performing schools in the US have the most per capita funding.
ty6853 1y ago
Because the population has been tricked way too many times with the "we're allocating these taxes to education" dogwhistle. When every fucking time they open a lottery or have a new tax, and promise it will go to the schools, but they defund what's coming out of the general fund to the schools by that exact amount, you can only cry wolf so many times before that doesn't work anymore. To get this to work anymore you're going to have to create a constitutional amendment or something that the school gets X and there will be no fuck fuck games that they aren't just defunding the schools some other place so they can use it on the next corrupt "construction" project.
kelseyfrog 1y ago
The U.S. can absolutely fund Scandinavian‑style social programs, it just chooses not to, in part because the reserve‑currency framework makes the optics of deficits uniquely skewed. This is one of the consequences of the US's self-inflicted burden of the Triffin Dilemma.
hunglee2 1y ago
sad that you're being downvoted here, very clear that the US investment into society is low in relative terms. In fact, doing so in considered 'socialism' and widely condemned by almost all the political establishment.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

The surplus came with alot of responsibilities, like policing the world. And that had a hefty price tag... nearly $1 trillion annually. Wasn't much left over for public transit and free foot massages. I can entertain arguments that it was a bad bargain.

actionfromafar 1y ago
IMHO that's a false dichotomy. The US has the worlds most inefficient health system, which is an incredibly large budget post, most of the money going to middlemen. Besides, it has also benefited from open shipping lanes as much as the rest of the world, if not more.
triceratops 1y ago
"Policing the world" doesn't have to cost that much. Nearly $2tn spent just on the pointless Iraq misadventure. How much public transit and education could that have funded?
- dgfitz 1y ago
  > How much public transit and education could that have funded? Given the current costs for NYC to expand its subway, about 500 miles of track given the current costs per mile.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    That sounds great actually.
  - triceratops 1y ago
    The entire NYC subway, the busiest system in the country, has 660 miles of track. NYC has a GDP of $1.3tn and the subway system has a big hand in making that possible. So that's actually a pretty good RoI. It'll go a lot further (haha!) in a less expensive city. But that also goes back to the original comment about spending the surplus wisely.
- rangestransform 1y ago
  Policing the world is a jobs program for all of the unionized factory workers at lockmart and Boeing that would otherwise be, at best, trades workers earning a more modest wage. We can thank the MIC’s placement of factories in strategic congressional districts for that
wpm 1y ago
There is plenty to pay for public transit, education, and healthcare. There always has been, locked away in stock market value owned by precious few people. On healthcare, we already pay way more than any other developed nation for far worse outcomes, we're literally WASTING money on it to make some shitheel health insurance CEOs a little richer. FOH with this woe is us bullshit, boo hoo it's so hard to police the world (something we also overpay for). We could have been taking care of each other the entire time, there is nothing stopping us but lies and attitudes like yours the lies beget.
- beeflet 1y ago
  >health insurance CEOs a little richer. To be honest, I don't even think it's just the people at the top profiting. The whole system is like designed to create as many useless jobs as possible. If I want to get a blood test, I have to do like 4-5 referrals before I can just get my test done. If I want a diagnosis, I have to wait a week to talk with a doctor who is going to push sponsored medication anyways. I'm better off doing the research myself and buying drugs through telehealth service or the greymarket. You would be better off just having a free market where consumers figure out what doctors/nurses/pharmaceuticals are safe on their own, and you strip intellectual property protections and legal requirements for prescription drugs. It shouldn't cost a million dollars to get an x-ray. It does because there are high legal barriers that allow rent-seekers to creep in.
atoav 1y ago
Yeah, only that if you spend more per capita on health care than comparable national, not less. So the argument of "We can't do $A like other countries do, because of $B" doesn't really fly if you spend more to get a worse outcome. The problem the US has in regards to healthcare, that the goal of its system isn't to supply its population with the best quality healthcare for the lowest amount of cost — the goal instead is to allow all kind of market actors and middle man to make a profit without the population revolting.
fatbird 1y ago
That $1T isn't an expense. Part of it is operational, meaning keepiong boats and bases running around the world, which earns the US yet more influence and soft power and unearned media. Much of it is acquisition costs, meaning $ going into a US defense tech for research and procurement of the most advanced hardware and maintenance of those industrial bases to do so; that hardware then gets sold to allies, among other things. Saudi Arabie just purchased $142 billion of US hardware. Playing "world cop" is a net win for America, not a cost it bears.
- s1artibartfast 1y ago
  Just because there is a soft power upside does not mean that it is a net positive. I often see this stated without any form of quantification. It is essentially a matter of faith.
  - beeflet 1y ago
    The net upside is maintaining the market that allows for a trade deficit in the first place. The problem is really that the two aren't directly linked. If you operate at a trade deficit, you don't need to manufacture at home. But if you can't manufacture at home, you can't build war machines efficiently, so you can't be the world police and ensure the market needed to operate at a trade deficit. By defunding the military you're pulling the rug out from under yourself in this sense. I would still agree that it's massively inefficient and needs to be fixed, but the working US-World system would still invest a lot of funding into the military.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      Unfortunately, at some point the people who are trading products for dollar bills will catch on that there's nothing that they can buy with the dollar bills that are worth the value of the products they sent across the ocean. When that happens, people will stop accepting the dollar bills as payment... but by that point, you've hollowed out your manufacturing to such a degree that you can't ever start it back up. So you can't trade for those products (no products of your own to trade), you can't purchase them (your own currency is worthless), You can't purchase them with other nations' currencies (nothing to sell for that), and you can't make the products yourself. But "soft power". We traded long term prosperity for the short term ability to meddle in other people's countries and lives.

rcpt 1y ago

Car infrastructure and sprawl is hugely expensive and we spend tons on it

rangestransform 1y ago
Even alon levy disagrees that maintaining suburban infrastructure is a huge driver of spending https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-about-urbanism/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-...
- rcpt 1y ago
  "Even alon levy" is worded to sound like "all the experts" but if you read the article it's clear that he's taking a minority opinion. And that's because he's wrong. The US spends huge amounts on car infrastructure. At every level of government numbers are just gigantic.

jandrewrogers 1y ago

The US spends $1T on education. It is extremely difficult to justify spending more when the US already spends far more per student than other developed countries. Same with infrastructure and healthcare. Without accountability for where that money went it would be foolish to throw even more money at it. Also, in the US, infrastructure, education, and healthcare is primarily the responsibility of individual States, so it really needs to be measured on a per State basis. For some of these things, some States deliver high quality at low cost and other States deliver low quality with an order of magnitude higher spending for the same thing. The correlation between spending and results is surprisingly weak. Competency and focus seems to play a greater role.

Vicarium 1y ago
Its never competency and focus. Individual influence averages out, its the system that creates the result at scale. To some extent higher per-student fees are expected in certain areas, most countries with heavily funded education aren't facing the same issues of rural population density. There's a lot of overhead costs to run so many schools. Then state policies and regulatory capture is the other side of course, all schools need X teaching aid from Y company for some obscene markup...
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  The system can’t do anything if academics and discipline aren’t instilled at home.
  - kiitos 1y ago
    The 1800s called and they want their moral standards back.
- nradov 1y ago
  Rural population density isn't a real problem for education. Some rural school districts have to run longer bus routes to service their students but those aren't particularly expensive.
1y ago

mousethatroared 1y ago

The US spends, per capita, more public funds on education and health care than any other industrialized nation in the world. Some of the worse performing schools in the US have the most per capita funding.

ty6853 1y ago

Because the population has been tricked way too many times with the "we're allocating these taxes to education" dogwhistle. When every fucking time they open a lottery or have a new tax, and promise it will go to the schools, but they defund what's coming out of the general fund to the schools by that exact amount, you can only cry wolf so many times before that doesn't work anymore. To get this to work anymore you're going to have to create a constitutional amendment or something that the school gets X and there will be no fuck fuck games that they aren't just defunding the schools some other place so they can use it on the next corrupt "construction" project.

kelseyfrog 1y ago

The U.S. can absolutely fund Scandinavian‑style social programs, it just chooses not to, in part because the reserve‑currency framework makes the optics of deficits uniquely skewed. This is one of the consequences of the US's self-inflicted burden of the Triffin Dilemma.

hunglee2 1y ago

sad that you're being downvoted here, very clear that the US investment into society is low in relative terms. In fact, doing so in considered 'socialism' and widely condemned by almost all the political establishment.