Jack Ma: US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure
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[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/go_east_young_man/2005/03...
[2] https://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/2016/05/31/otoole-takin...
It's only possible because they built it through the slums, which are essentially in medieval conditions. The train terminates in the region where the people had enough political/actual capital to object to it going through their neighborhood.
But it is very, very fast.
And it doesn't really matter how involved you are in local politics. The federal government can already take your land with emminent domain.
edit: I guess that is redundant under unchecked eminent domain power.
If your hours + declared tips were less than minimum wage then they had to pay you minimum wage. That only happened at one large chain I worked at but not at the local, one-off places. Tips were large enough on weekends that it didn't matter much, or at least not enough to risk your job complaining.
The locally run bars I worked at didn't care about tip ratios, but the corporate chains expected you to average 18% tips and would penalize you if you were pulling less than 13% for several weeks -- cuz it either meant you were absolutely terrible at your job, or else you were lying.
A president that isn’t a man child too.
Hitler built the autobahn, a road system that is still enviable to this day—doesn't mean we want the system of governance that guided this project into being.
This isn't a necessary dichotomy either, you can invest in infrastructure without being authoritarian. But I think we celebrate China forgetting how some of these projects are greased through the system and carried out.
Japan, Korea, EU countries et al seem to make modern train lines and other infrastructure just fine without that.
Or how about modernizing the NYC subway for example? No "domain power" needed for that, just political will...
This has been operational since 2002/2004 so about 15 years ago.
The technology to build fast trains has existed for more than 60 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train#Construc...
[2] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/10/from-250-million-to-6...
So potentially nearly 20x more man hours to get a train 6x faster.
- backstops the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, which allows the US to have a large deficit with low risk to its economic system, which basically means the US can ship paper to other countries and they will send real stuff back to us in return. Let's not kid ourselves, this has a lot to do with the US' large military and financial advantage.
- makes opportunistic authoritarian governments around the world think thrice before invading their neighbors. Consider what it would be like if the charts here were moving up and to the right instead of flat: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
- ensures the relative safety and efficiency of international shipping routes and underpins global commerce
- provides funding for basic research has lead to many innovations. DARPA, anyone?
- keeps weapons expertise and manufacturing capacity within US borders, which creates US jobs and reduces the capability of other governments to develop competitive arms independently, which keeps them within the sphere of US influence and protection. Other countries look at our military budget and think "we could never compete, let's just buy their weapons, and make nice with the US". Think of what the alternative would look like.
We can debate the morality of the specific wars that the US has gotten entangled in. We can debate the relative size of the military budget, to some degree. But it would be foolhardly to ignore the upsides to military spending altogether.
I think this is what people don't get about US military spending. From the moment you wake up every single day you are directly benefiting from it as an American. The fact that you, as a normal middle class person, are able to step out of your brand new house purchased with a no money down 30 year mortgage, step into a brand new car you don't own that's financed at 2%, drive to a brand new shiny shopping mall, and buy brand new fancy $200 t-shirts at the shopping mall on your no-limit 0% credit card is because of the fiat-reserve currency system setup by the US fed, and defended by the military.
https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/media/_m...
Analysis in this paper also based on Census data.
Also, I don't know that I would exactly declare victory on poverty rate based on just recent data. It looks like we've just fought it to a rough standstill from the 70's on, which is disappointing from an advancement of civilization point of view. The 2010 decrease was just getting it back to 1970's level poverty after an increase bubbled up post-2008.
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...
Note the rise in the below 50% poverty level figure in the chart.
In fact I'd argue this is exactly what's happening. The people who are willing and able to move out of impoverished regions to the coastal megacities are doing much, much better now than they were 10 years ago. But the ones who have stayed are sinking deeper and deeper into poverty as the economy completely shifts focus.
what do you mean by "largest portion" here?
That is just simply not true. The largest part of the US budget is ~1.25 trillion USD spent on Social Security and Unemployment, after that it's ~1 trillion on Medicare & Medicade, and ~600 billion on Defense.
Make no mistake the US spends wayyyy too much on the military, but it's not #1
This is a totally ass-backwards way to do stimulus and domestic investing, with the upside that it lets you do stimulus and domestic investing while pretending you're not doing it, but doing something macho and patriotic instead.
This is a way to maintain US economic and diplomatic dominance while pretending it's all about Defense/The Homeland/Freedom(tm), all while telling all those soldiers busy getting killed and wounded by (who this time?) and killing bewildered probably innocent (whooo?) that this is all about loving and defending your country.
If you can't openly sell empire to your citizens, maybe you shouldn't have an empire.
To speak to the parent's points -- WW1 happened and the League of Nations failed to prevent an even worse conflagration.
Say what you will about US v USSR, or the post-Cold War US hegemony, there has been no WWIII.
Combat deaths in the US military are lower on average than roofers, steel workers, fisherman, loggers, and quite a few other professions.
So I don't think that argument holds water. There are actually some theories that the specific group of young males that join the military are safer than if they didn't due to traffic accidents and other stupid things that young males do when they've got too much free time and too little discipline.
When I am feeling very cynical, I think of how government spending and pork-barrel politics reflect the same quirk of psychology seen in the marketing of burly SUVs and trucks to the segment that could otherwise be served by minivans and economy cars.
WWII is what enabled the US to adopt this position, and its memory, rapidly fading into history, are why the US chose involvement and leadership of the world instead of isolation. Before WWII the US was (relatively) isolationist. You can claim that it would have been better off staying that way, but given the way things spiraled into WWII, the conclusion of US leaders was a reasonable one: we must lead, or else things will spiral into conflict once again, and we will not be able to contain, control, or ignore it.
How could they come to any other conclusion? They had already tried the "let's try to avoid picking sides and please can't we all just get along" option in WWI and it turned out, shall we say, badly.
None of this excuses the absolute folly of the US' many military misadventures, and likely huge amounts of waste (in terms of people and treasure) in pursuing them. I am merely pointing out that the idea that we could abolish most military spend because somehow the world will just get along by itself, or even that we can just ignore what happens elsewhere, is just not the case and hasn't been for a long time.
Sure it's hard to assess how much military spending is the "right" amount and how much US prevents unrest on global scale. But let's not kid ourselves, we'd all be better off if we didn't have to spend money on keeping armies. They produce next to nothing on economic growth or scientific progress. We'd be having colonies on Mars if US had spent a part of that money on NASA.
I won't defend US incompetence wrt infrastructure. But I will observe that "spending more" hardly seems to be the problem, as we seem to do plenty of that already. It's that (lack of) stuff we get in return that's the problem.
As far as global "peace", it is certainly true there is still conflict, but from the bigger picture perspective it's been a relatively peaceful half century.
Again I'll point to this chart: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace. Consider that the y-axis is log scale, and contemplate the WWI and WWII bubbles at the top.
But say what if US had reduced military spending after the collapse of Soviet Union by let's say half, would the world be much worse than it's today? From statistical perspective while it seems that there's causation between US military superiority and the lack of conflicts compared to prior decades, it might be as well that the world has just become less warlike. Sure it would suck if WW3 happened though. Anyway, it's not a reason not to fix your infrastructure :).
This can only have been an ironic or tongue-in-cheek comment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
Someone has to really have drank the kool-aid to even comprehend that statement, never mind believe it. What does military spending have to do with basic research?
If what you mean is that the US has a convoluted, wasteful system where workers work, get taxed, the money is sent to the Pentagon, and physicists at universities have to write out fantasy-laden grant proposals to DARPA about how their non-military basic research work has military purposes, then yes, "US military spending provides funding for basic research". This really got going in the 1970s, I recall one story of a physicist grant proposal for a basic research study into the theory of relativity being presented as research that would benefit small trajectory changes in rocket launches.
You seem to have a high estimation of the idea of the rest of the world on the leash of imperial America (with the phrase imperial America being apropos for your picture). I suppose American academics doing basic research should also be subjected to domination by the Pentagon, in your view.
Japan has a much less wasteful funding of research with MITI. You don't have scientists wasting time writing bogus grant proposals for basic research being reviewed by people sitting at desks in the Department of Defense.
https://www.aaas.org/programs/r-d-budget-and-policy/historic...
No, I don't believe this is a great system. On the other hand, consider that if research spending weren't under this guise, would popular support for research allow for the funding to exist at current levels, much less increased ones? Given understanding of the average American of basic science, that would be a stretch (to put it mildly).
Perhaps having researchers write a few extra paragraphs in grant proposals isn't so bad after all.
One can bring up evil dictators or reserve currency or whatever, but there is lots of waste, irresponsible spending, pork barrel, district welfare and all sorts of other issues. To say nothing of the contractor complex.
The objectives you speak of aren't being efficiently nor sustainably achieved. They are arguably and very tenuously occasionally being brute forced out in an extremely wasteful fashion.
And this isn't a statement on the righteousness of American power projection which is another argument all together.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/71bq8h/cmv_th...
See the wikipedia page on military expenditures for budget estimates and their sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
If we all just say "Thank you!!" over and over again, we are absolved.
After the first Gulf War, there was a deliberate effort to thank the troops when they got home, which has persisted after 9/11.
https://www.amazon.com/Spitting-Image-Memory-Legacy-Vietnam/...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army#Mil...
But assuming anyway that the spending is a requirement - the question becomes how efficient that spending is, and where the money is really going. If it's being spent efficiently to support defense operations and capabilities, that's great - if it's going to line the pockets of contractors and corporations spun up largely to capture wealth, that's not so great (for many cases it's probably somewhere in a spectrum).
Re-investing whatever efficiencies can be saved from careful economies into both better military infrastructure and civilian infrastructure seems like it'd massively benefit everyone. (although worth noting that cost-cutting itself also has to be done in a way that doesn't impact security; in some cases I can imagine that defunding risky or questionable projects could in fact improve security)
So many lives wasted in dull duty.
It depicts a boundary line between the city and urban village. And government had the power to relocate 150k in a snap to get the development going [1]
How many countries can actually do that? Sure, couple of hundreds of people can be moved but 100k people, I am sure that cause a riot of sorts and project shut down very quickly.
George W Bush had exceptionally terrible taste when it came to his cabinet.
Most of the money CIRCULATES in a country. So it's not like it's one shot and done. The money was paid to some people who then spent it back into the economy and it went round and round. So at most we diverted a certain number of hops of a huge amount of money to a thing.
I look at money as sort of wheels with cogs turning at a certain speed. When you launch some new project, it might pick up momentum by having other cogs spin it up. It can even "grow" in market cap depending on whether increased demand for it drives up the prices for it. But that price can also drop to zero later, as new things come out, eliminating vast swaths of "wealth" in a stock or cryptocurrency or whatever.
So back to my question... money isn't just a one-time resource that a country can spend and can never get back. However, from the point of view of a government, they only get so much revenue per year, so it should be said about the US government and not the country as a whole. The government taxes and diverts money to things that individuals would not do on their own. Fiat currencies allow further powers to print money — before WW2 pundits thought that military activities on such scale were simply not possible to be funded with taxes etc.
Everywhere in the world I go, I see the vast majority of people are regular folks who just want to put food on the table and laugh with their family. It’s the governments and media that whips up all this warfare and propaganda and we wind up paying for it, and people on the other side of the world wind up dying as a result. That’s what the tragedy is. The money paid to eg Blackwater mercenaries or the rest of the military industrial complex probably found its way back to the US economy in short order.
Taxation is normally for taking money from the rich and spending on the poor. In this case however, money was taken from the middle and lower working classes, and given to the rich stock owners. And the country got nothing in return, not bridges, trains, or roads.
If you give rich people tax breaks and they spend it purchasing and bubbling real estate, your gdp might show good numbers, but money is just circulating among the rich.
My point is that the money keeps circulating. Isn’t it short sighted the other way, to act as if it disappeared?
Circulating among rich or poor is a different question - of outsorcing, automation, demand for human labor and services, UBI and so on - rather than spending it on the armed forces. Poor people get paid in the armed forces and go spend that money into the economy too. It’s apples and oranges. I’m saying the tragedy is the bombing and destruction, the money found its way back into the economy.
American defense spending spends lesser on the poor, and the country does not even get bridges or trains in return.
"In 2014, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers (those with AGIs below $38,173) earned 11.27 percent of total AGI. This group of taxpayers paid approximately $38 billion in taxes, or 2.75 percent of all income taxes in 2014.
In contrast, the top 1 percent of all taxpayers (taxpayers with AGIs of $465,626 and above) earned 20.58 percent of all AGI in 2014, but paid 39.48 percent of all federal income taxes.
In 2014, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $543 billion, or 39.48 percent of all income taxes, while the bottom 90 percent paid $400 billion, or 29.12 percent of all income taxes." [0]
[0]: https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
If the federal budget came from federal taxes, it would be necessarily constrained to them and deficits would be impossible.
2. Jack Ma is a Member of the CCP. US spending less on military has a direct benefits to China.
3. US infrastructure sucks. To the point it may be barely better than many developing countries. But it has very little, or if anything to do with billions invested in DOD.
Both the US interstate system and the Internet came from military roots. Its all about motivation, war and fear of war seems to be great motivators for funding and building infrastructure.
To the extent that reporting was and is accurate, not only were we spending our "blood and treasure" in this war, we were laying the groundwork for Chinese economic and political expansion.
Building part of the foundation for the Great Belt, as it were, and as we learn more more fully, now.
[edit] I should have been more clear: Please mark the article as 2017 as when I read it initially I was asking my self why the WEF was now when it usually is during the start of the year.
> What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road? The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated. The worst is atomic war. The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Education? Infrastructure? Corporations don't benefit from that. Ruining countries and installing 'democracy' to ensure billion dollar contracts? Great business.
While most of the world still thinks in nationalistic terms - our country vs theirs, folks who run corporations that span across 100 countries do not and cannot think in those terms.
Obama and the Democratic Congress delivered a stimulus bill in 2009 that was largely "shovel-ready" infrastructure spending. Because of that, it was attacked by the GOP, who then took over Congress and has proceeded to underfund infrastructure as a means of weakening unions. And of course they're now flying an "America First" flag and wondering why things aren't better.
The power of companies in the political process is easy to overstate. Political movements are an industry unto themselves and sometimes easily overwhelm corporate priorities. The military as a cultural force in America politics is very powerful... military contractors essentially surf this wave. They didn't create it; they are far too stupid for that. It was created by veterans and politicians and the consulting ecosystem that supports them. It is in some respects the pendulum still swinging back from the darkest days of the post-Vietnam War period, when people would spit on vets and call them "baby killers."
At this point in time, construction workers--and especially unionized construction workers--are not nearly as strong a cultural force, so infrastructure companies have a much smaller wave to surf.
That could be changing with Trump, but who knows what is real with that guy. He is all talk on a large number of subjects... he has done what he said he would in trade and immigration, but not even close in healthcare or infrastructure. Ironically for all his talk of America First, Trump's personal attention is focused almost exclusively outward, at allies, trading partners, and immigrants.
You bring up heath care, which is another industry also had a successful role in shaping American politics. It just seems like real estate developers / construction companies could up their game a bit to steer things towards infrastructure projects.
who then took over Congress
Would you care to itemize specifics of those "shovel-ready" projects?
He is an extremely talented person and smart entrepreneur, but it's hard to believe that his US foreign affair statements have no background agenda. It also could be that the main audience for his message is inside China, not outside of it.
The statements quoted in the article are an oblique way of saying something about that.
More accurately, it's been a subsidy to the capitalists controlling particular corporations, with strategic distribution of jobs among Congressional districts as political cover (or hostages, depending on how you look at it.)
The US spent $14 trillion upholding a world order of free trade and international maritime law which directly benefited China and was responsible for its own export based growth over the last 30 years. We're seeing that global order realign now, with things like Brexit and Trump, but I'm not sure we want a world without the US spending this kind of money.
Would it be a better if China controlled all navigation within the South China Sea? Why don't we just let Putin roll over the Baltics? That's the real reasoning behind US defense spending. Sure you can point to Iraq and Afghanistan line items, but the vast majority of recurring spending is on strategic naval and air forces to pursue long term objectives like this.
Unfortunately warfare doesn't work like an optimization algorithm. People are irrational, lack perfect information, and are susceptible to psychological manipulation. You cannot simply have a force two or three times larger than the enemy. Maintaining peace requires an overwhelming order of magnitude in force which ensures no one will ever be challenged. That's the entire basis of Pax Americana.
As far as the budget, all that info is openly available. But the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan have cost about $1.3 trillion, or two years of the total defense budget. The vast majority of recurring military spending is salaries, VA benefits, R&D, and maintaining/upgrading the navy and air force.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
I am a huge supporter of the U.S. Navy's freedom of navigation duties. It's expensive, and it's worth it. But carpet bombing Baghdad does nothing for our trade routes.
Every reasonable person thinks Iraq was a mistake in hindsight. Of course it was. But that does not negate the other 85% of all US defense spending which has been a shield against tyranny for the vast majority of humanity. Our support of NATO is the only reason eastern Europe is still independent. Our defense of South Korea is the only reason Seoul still exists. Yes there have been mistakes made with having this level of intervention in the world. But to give in to this kind of whataboutism rhetoric that sees the US as an evil empire, in a world full of Russias and Chinas, is just insanity.
If 15% of military spending was such a wild blunder, what’s makes you so sure the remaining 85% is solid spending?
China has been ramping up their own military spending like crazy the past few years. Plenty of articles from CNN and other media "The US should be scared of the Chinese military because of XYZ". Their infrastructure programs are just as bad as here. Difference is, we have actual code enforcement and building regulations that, yes, raise the price and increase in time to build/repair. But that also ensures that you get fewer buildings and public projects that crumble after a few years.
I also find it interesting that a lot of people jump on public transit as a poster child of "infrastructure". The economics for mass transit over large stretches SUCKS. It's one of the worst investments into public good.
Let's take a place I use to live in just 6 months ago, Colorado Springs. It's about 60-70 miles south of Denver. The Springs is a decent sized city (270k population). Roughly 21% of springs residents work in the Denver area. This was evaluated because I-25 is the main road between the two cities and a majority of it is just 2 lanes. Back ups. Oh my God. The back up traffic was so fucking bad. If I had to do a contract in Denver and had to be there at 9am, I had to be out on the road at before 6:45am to make it around 8:45am. That's if there wasn't an accident along the way. Anyways, a cost analysis was done to either provide mass transit between the two cities or give I-25 another lane on a ~50 mile stretch.
So, let's see, that's about 56,700 people that have a nearly daily need of going back and forth. To make it attractive for people to use, it has to be cheaper than standard car fuel costs. Yes, there's maintenance costs that SHOULD be considered. But normal people would never figure that in. That's like expecting people to "Read the terms and services". Driving my Jetta, it's about 4 gallons round trip. Between 8-12 bucks a day in fuel, depending on gas prices. Now, a car provides a level of freedom too. I can leave whenever I want. Go when I want. If you ever relied on mass transit for work (I did when I lived in Seattle and in Portland), you spend a lot of hours waiting. You show up early for the bus to take you to the WES train, which you wait for, that takes you to the Blue Line tram, that you have to wait for, that you then go to roughly where you need to be on foot. Essentially, you save little practical time. Yes, you can read. My answer. Library card and free audio books. Maybe if the cost is $5 for the day between CS and Denver. But more than that. I'll drive. I like sleeping when I can.
Oh and commuters don't run all day. Just the peak hours to and from work. As in. You don't get to "stay in the city for a little while". You have to go. Immediately after work. There's no waiting around. Have to work late? Got to call a friend with a car. You owe him gas money now as well.
Okay, now to the economics. IF, major if, 56,700 people take the commuter everyday at $5 X about 20 workdays a month X 12 months = $6.8 million a year. Let's say $7 million. Every year. Revenue generated. Now, minus fuel. Minus train maintenance. Minus employees. Even a $10 daily ticket only gives $14 million. For a how big of an initial investment? A billion dollar one? Even at half a billion, that's 35 years to break even if all the employees volunteer and the fuel was free. Shit, I forgot about insurance for whoever runs that train. In 35 years, you'd probably need a major revamp again. It's like being on a tram or train from the 80s/90s at this point. Another major cost sink.
But some of those 56k+ commuters, still need their cars. I built custom servers, delivered and installed them in Denver. You ever carry a 3u filled with hard drives? A lot of commuters are manual laborers too. You know, poor, hard working folks. Guys who do plumbing or electrical work. Dry wall. Carpenters. Those are just the commuters that pop in mind. They have too many tools and materials to ever imagine using public transit if their job requires them to actually carry their own gear. Plus, they have to travel around on a moment's notice.
Or spend the $350 million to expand the interstate which nearly everyone uses ALREADY. Logically speaking, what would politicians approve? You think they're going to risk having their heads roll for a half billion dollar investment that SOME people MAY use? Or expand what people ALREADY use?
You can apply the same logic to easily 90% of the rest of the country and come to similar results. There are definitely outliers to where it works. But let's not shoehorn ideas where they don't belong.
In reality though, being in the lead of commuter train technology is a lot like being in the lead of horse drawn carriage tech.
Are there infrastructure problems here? Fuck yea there are. The aging water system is major one. Electrical grids are being upgraded but there are trouble spots. Same with gas lines. Telecomm needs an over haul. Too many cities are also bottle necked on highways. If a natural disaster happens in certain cities, there's only one way out. Plus, just in time inventory causes major issues when these places do get cut off due to flooding. I'm not even getting started on social issues. Legit issues of dealing with foster care, criminal rehabilitation, mental health facilities, etc. Oh fucking hell, what about education? That too is a shit show. But to cry that other countries have "better trains"... seriously? How about we first deal with an aging water system before we shed tears for high-tech trains.
Also, wrong towards "It doesn't matter who says it". It really does. Because the connotations start to pop up. People start to bring up what that person "does right". It burns my ass that yes, the right conversation finally starts, then red herrings out to some bullshit territory like "more mass transit". No. We don't need that. We shouldn't solve Chinese problems in America. Trains are not our damn focus. Let's not forgot, they are sinking in debt just as bad as us. They've postured for a long time of being a "cash society". That little fairy tale is unraveling on them. They're not magically better. Factories closing. Human rights violations up the wazoo. Let's not miss how xenophobic they are. You think non-Han Chinese have a wonderful time? Hell, there's a government program to end their own Muslim communities in the western parts. They have, essentially, government minders that report on their non-party-approved activities. A forced assimilation program in essence. Oh, and that island that was "always there and always Chinese territory".
It's also funny, "invest in the Mid west". Really? I thought you all hate the mid west for mostly voting for republicans. Now, it's "Ma is right. We need to invest in the mid west" Come on! Seriously? And people also thought we should all politically follow Zuckerburg since he's rich and techie. How'd all that work out?
I'm all for investing into different parts of America. But shouldn't we invest in the Mid West because it's part of America and is struggling and we should help each other out? Not because some rich guy said so?
This got off to rant territory pretty bad. But this is silliness and someone needs to call it out. The comments in HN to this article is a prime example that the one problem this country has is too many people look elsewhere for answers instead of internally. It's complained that companies hire from the outside to lead/manage instead of internally. That thought process is represented here too.
We put a huge pile of money on the ground and lit it on fire killing a bunch of people in the process.
Maybe someone smarter than me can explain how this was a good idea but I just don't get it.
But it's still theft from the system and is a transfer of purchasing power from those who produce to those who do not. Or in case of military contractors, from those who produce to those who destroy. Professionally.
Have you seen the footage of bombing of ISIS cash dump with US currency flying out? Guess the pallets of dollars going over there for reconstruction was the source.
It's a waste. Waste of spending, waste of effort, waste of resources. The human effort and material spent on that endeavor could have done a lot for this country.
Also morality aside, if we are empire, if we are going to police the world, we are doing so in a very unsustainable fashion.
This is just what I can't help but see. Maybe I'm wrong. Not really trying to argue but damn, this a big elephant of wasteful effort and resource allocation.
Plus, that $14 Trillion was invested in US companies, granted military leaning ones but still the money was put back in our economy. And USA sold and will sell a lot of weapons because of that R & D
Plus it started recently and war is (kinda) the default state in some places. It can be a lot worse
The U.S. already has most (not all) of the infrastructure we need. A lot of what we need to build is to replace existing infrastructure which is getting old but technically still works.
Comparing Chinese to American infrastructure spend is comparing apples to oranges.
Furthermore, if you want to look at where America is wasting money, compare the percentage of GDP Canada spends on healthcare to the percentage the U.S. spends. The difference is likely larger than the 5% or so of GDP we've been spending on defense.
And keep in mind that most of U.S. spending on defense isn't warfare, it really is defense, partly because we have obligations to defend other countries, some of which might be at substantial risk right now (We have no obligation to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression, but we most definitely have an obligation to defend Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia).
Jack Ma calls it warfare you call it defense. Whatever term you wish to use is fine with me. The trillions we spent on defense in Iraq and Afghanistan certainly was not well spent.
We do have an obligation to defend the Ukraine against Russian attacks. That was the deal they made with us when they gave up nukes in the early 90s.
This is such a common misconception. I wonder where it came from. The Budapest Memorandum is short and understandable. Is this just a game of telephone gone badly wrong, or is there propaganda at work?
And yes, healthcare spending is unnecessarily insane. Healthcare is tough though because it is not your ordinary product. Is it a right? How do we deal with different levels of care? Politicians don't want to answer these questions. The truth is there is unlimited demand and limited resources in a market where we feel morally obligated to give everyone the absolute best-- an impossibility. Healthcare is just one example that gives me doubts about our political system. Do we have the collective courage/wisdom to make big, important decisions? Sometimes any decision is better than none and I see our current healthcare system as a non-decision-- a "kick the can down the road".
What scares me about China is their gov't's ability to make these decisions (whether right/wrong, regardless of consequences) and get shit done as well as their people's staunch nationalism, essentially, our weaknesses. I do think that western values of freedom and transparency win in the long game, I just hope that the free nations can stay in the game long enough to win.
On that note. I think we need to get better at being a country--politically, economically, etc. We need to work on inefficiencies in the markets: monopolies, corruption, and players in comfortable positions because they've gamed the system. The free market should be uncomfortable for all players. Constant competition is what we want. Unfortunately, as players in the free market win, they gain power and alter the rules of the market so it is no longer free/efficient. We can't fault them for these self-preservation tactics, hell we view them as individuals right? (corporate personhood, Citizens United, etc). At the same time we need to seek out and prevent these cancerous tendencies. In addition, don't let corporations get too big too fail. Let corporations that are no longer fit, die!
I watched that Crouching Tiger series on youtube and while I recognize that it is a bit alarmist, it's tough to ignore the facts.