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Comment by bobmno | Hacker News Reader

17 trillion in debt, time to cut back

Have you actually read the White House's plan? They themselves (I'm not strawmanning here) have said that overall spending and the debt is going to increase, most of that going to the military. No "cutting back" is happening.

Not sure if you're sarcastic or trolling .

Cut back on by far the largest and most expensive military in the world then.

NOAA budget 2016: $5.8 billion

US military budget: $600 billion

And they're proposing a $54 billion increase.

You could probably trim 10 NOAAs from the military industrial complex and nothing would be lost.

With the proviso that US military support and materiel has been used as trade goods for alliance-making with other countries for most of the last century. A large portion of the US military budget is "being the substitute military for US allies."

The key question of decreasing US government spending is how to get other countries to pony up for the "renting" of the US military forces that they're already doing (because the alternative is that the US withdraws military support from those countries—and then those countries build back up their own militaries. Which, undoubtedly, would put us in a very different world than the one we're in right now...)

You should take a look at world military budgets... actually look at the countries that are spending the money.

$1.7T/year in total military spending worldwide.

China at 200B, Russia at 70B.

Iran? 22nd largest military budget at $10B.

The rest of the big spenders are our friends and allies. I'm not going to count up every country, but roughly 1.3T to 1.4T is spent by the US + allies + friendly countries.

Who are we preparing for war with?

Who are we preparing for war with?

Our own citizens, of course.

One of the scenarios that concern the EU is Russia invading and occupying EU states before Nato or the US can respond, present them with a kind of fait accompi and hoping the political will to respond won't be there. So the US needs the ability to convincingly be able to take on entrenched Russian occupation of multiple other countries and take them back.

The US Military leadership has publicly lobbied against raising military spending at the expense of other government activities. They know that national security depends on a comprehensive international relations investments.

The White House is pandering to their populist base and contravening the advice of their own military experts

I think this is a good point, and I'm not sure why it's been downvoted.

It's important to consider the sometimes positive externalities of the current levels of defense spending. Even more so, it's important to consider where we or others have come to rely on those positive externalities.

For example, I'd be perfectly happy with the US withdrawing from many parts of the world and closing foreign bases. However, I do imagine there would be sometimes not so subtle consequences to doing so. Is the current balance of global power sufficient to prevent large scale and disastrous conflict? Do we risk tipping that balancing in one direction at some point?

Does the US lending both hands to fucking up the Middle East make anything more stable? What stability was achieved by Vietnam, or all that stuff in South America? Not disastrous enough for you? Would you swap with even just ONE of the millions of people affected by some of the more insane atrocities this knight in shining armor committed? Thought so.

Another fact that is generally completely omitted is that best, soldiers defend against other soldiers (and in practice, they kill a lot of civilians because war is tough), so in a way those people justifying war machineries in other countries are not the excuse, they are the counterparts. It's an axis of sociopaths and conformists against humans, and this rift goes through all nations, even some families. The root causes for these rationalizations matter, not so much the rationalizations, those always shift. A child kicking a dog and Abu Ghraib differ in scale but not principle, as does looking on to either. Those onlookers love to use "we", but there is no "we" here, speak strictly for yourself.

Not seeing what you're trying to argue. Lots of appeal to emotion here. I'll make it simple for you:

1. Me: High levels of defense spending has easily identifiable consequences. But we need to be careful that we also take time to identify the positives and consider them.

2. You: The US has done bad things in the past and war is bad.

I don't disagree with you, but you're not rebutting my point.

And why would any positives matter, if there weren't actual people and their lives, and suffering inflicted or avoided, involved down the line? Lots of appeal to robots here. I'm not a robot.

> But we need to be careful that we also take time to identify the positives and consider them.

Yes, and then you need to circle back and consider both, in context, including opportunity costs.

> The US has done bad things in the past and war is bad.

Respond to what I said or don't, but don't appeal to a 3 year old you're not talking with.

>And why would any positives matter, if there weren't actual people and their lives, and suffering inflicted or avoided

That's implied. You're either missing the point or not arguing in good faith. Have a good day.

Yes, we need to make room for the the trillions of dollars in new spending Trump has already proposed.

And statues. Many, many statues, wrought from American steel.

The military is 60 percent of the budget.

It's not. Defense comes in at 15% of federal spending. Social security and medicare combined come in at 4x that amount.

Source:http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/120/2017-Estimate

Yeah and they take a very specific tax out of everyone's paycheck to pay for those two programs.

If you want to have an argument about them that's fine but they have separate budgets and should be discussed separately.

They are both taxes. All else equal, taxpayers would happily pay 1pts more income tax and 2pt less social security, or vice versa. All my tax dollars are the same color.

Lumping social security in with taxes? You must be very good with numbers.

I'll ignore the ad hominem.

Minus SS, it's still less than 21% of total federal spending.

If you're going to concede that point (ss) then the same applies to Medicare. This completely destroying your argument coincidentally.

It doesn't. Defense spending is not 60% of the "budget". Further, it's not a large component of the total federal budget.