Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

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> I take pride in paying my taxes. It reminds me that our society has a cost, and we all contribute towards it.

Society's cost needs to be constrained by taxpayers. We need to put pressure on our governments to spend our tax dollars efficiently.

I live in California, so I pay state income tax as well as Federal income tax. I don't think I get as much per dollar of my tax as someone in Europe does. Europeans pay a little bit more than me (yes, only a little bit, I did the math) and get a lot more from their government, including comprehensive public transit that makes transit in the USA look like a joke, a much better social safety net, comprehensive health care not tied to their employers, schools that are actually good, low-cost higher education, etc. People in the UK get more from their government under Tory austerity policies than Americans ever got.

I don't want to pay more taxes until I get more for each dollar. If the Europeans can do it, so can we, but the political will does not exist here.

Your tax dollars pay for a lot more military than the Europeans do.

Yeah, but that's an efficiency problem, both in the sense that the Department of Defense is not efficient with money and that we have more military than we need.

And a significant portion of the DOD's budget is spent protecting other countries, many of them even in Europe.

Our tax dollars pay for more of their military than they do...

Do you have a source for this?

That WE pay (or more) for THEIR military.

The argument is not that the US is literally paying for country X's military. It's that counties benefit from being under the US's umbrella (such as through NATO), and thus do not spend as much as they would if the US had a much smaller military. This has been a major talking point of the current president [0].

The more nuanced question is if the resulting power + influence is worth the cost for the US.

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/03/nato-spending-2017.html

You use the words "benefit" an "umbrella" that are actually euphemisms for the military occupation of defeated countries after WWII.

A country does not benefit having another country occupying their land. Germany is the fourth manufacturer of weapons of the world, they do not need to be defended or protected like the world "umbrella" implies, they can do it on their own.

If the Germans-Europeans had to pay for all the cost involved in the occupation there will be no reason to have the US army on Europe's land.

I understand that. We don’t pay for anyone’s military but ours. If our spending in our alliances is high, and there’s a way to bring the cost down, we should be doing it.

But that’s not what OP said. He/she is speaking in absolutes: “Our tax dollars pay for more of their military than they do...” it helps no one and I wanted to call them out on their lie.

Your source _completely_ glances over the fact that the EU's total budget is spend on defending Europe while the US budget is not only for protecting itself and NATO but also Korea, Japan, Philippines and many more for a total of some 700(!!!) foreign military bases.

To then simply conclude that the US spends '70% of NATO defense spending' is incorrect since you inflate it with cost for defending a lot of territories outside of NATOs scope.

Of course the US pays more in total, but the EU doesn't have 700 military bases outside of the EU.

We don't have any bases in PI, and Japan pays for the bases we have there. I'm not sure about Korea.

Very different situation than Europe.

And Germany pays for the bases there. It's not so different.

The US puts the military where it wants to because it serves the US's interest. Don't believe for a second that it's to "protect Europe."

Perhaps you're unfamiliar with the concept of NATO. We spend all the money on defense and we put bases all over the world to protect the countries they are in.

Does this serve US interests? Unquestionably. That doesn't invalidate my statement.

Yeah. I'm familiar. NATO is a joint treaty that obligates all members to come to the defense of other members. It was formed post world war II at the behest of the USA in order to combat political influence from the USSR in Europe.

The USA doesn't fund NATO. Funding for NATO comes from all member organizations. All member organizations provide troops and materiel for joint operations.

The US spends "all the money on defense" because it's a fantastic government jobs program for mostly white folks.

The US has bases around the world to influence local politics. The idea that it's to protect those countries is simplistic at best.

There are only five of the 29 member states of NATO that meet the NATO requirement for defense spending. Germany isn't one of them. The US spends nearly double the requirement, which in actual numbers works out to the majority of the funding anyway (72%). The next three countries combined get to 20%, that's UK, France, and Germany.

The NATO direct budget is paid 22% by the US, 14% by Germany, 10% by the UK. The rest of the contributions are all less than 10% of the budget. So yes, the US does fund NATO, both with direct and indirect costs. The EU can afford to not spend money on their defense because we exist, and because we base our assets there.

Influencing local politics is not the primary reason for having bases located remotely, in many cases it doesn't even happen. The idea that we put them there to "influence local politics" is actually the simplistic explanation that really doesn't begin to describe how the world works. The US presence in Germany has nothing to do with influencing anything in Germany, the US presence in Korea has nothing to do with influencing Korea, the US presence in Spain has nothing to do with influencing Spain, etc.

Sure. The US is doing this because they care about the people and countries where their bases are.

It's not because they want to reduce the amount of influence the former USSR and China could exert.

We clearly have very different world views. I'd suggest we end this here.

No, a lot of it is responsibility.

We have the military to do it, and somebody has to hold off USSR aggression since the countries who should be doing it won't spend the money on their own defense to do it (I used USSR purposely -- we really shouldn't be in Germany anymore as that threat really doesn't exist, at least in the form it did, anymore).

That's part of the issue with NATO. NATO has become a code for saying the US will spend the money to do it.

Korea was to stop the spread of communism in SE Asia, and we're still there to do exactly that -- again, we shouldn't have to be there anymore, but who has the money to spend on defense? We do, so we do it.

US is also the largest arm supplier in the world and it is defending countries from arms that they provided themselves.

Not really.

My California tax dollars don't. And I'm not always sure what I get for them.

As a European I agree and I also think European countries as a whole are hugely inefficient on how they use tax money. We should pay taxes and we should demand ever increasing efficiency with equal great enthusiasm.

If you guys think that Europe or the US are inefficient in using tax money, try looking at Brazil and see what inefficient really looks like.

No doubt. I have many Brazilian friends and all I can say is "holy fuck". I'm sorry your country is so damaged.

I think this is the challenge. Balancing efficiency and contributions.

If government is over-budgeted, it can become lazy, tempted to put some of it in their pockets, etc.

Under-budgeted, it can break down, such as what is hapenning to Greece.

That's just a hard problem honestly. With no clear answers.

That said, I do feel in the US, people don't actually want the government to give them anything. They're against having it offer affordable health-care, or education, or child care, or paternity/maternity leaves, or environmental safeguards, or proper water cleaning facilities, or art projects, or fund research, etc.

So on one hand people are dismissive of most things the government could provide. But on the other hand, the money is still collected in taxes, it just goes in other things.

I think it hurts priority discussions a bit. It would be one thing to say, cut taxes. But it's another to say, given the current budget, don't spend it on anything nice, because that would be too communist of us.

So where does all the money go then? Military?

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