Well he _is_ a founder of Palantir.

He secretly funded a lawsuit against gawker which was pretty shady of him.

He thinks women shouldn't vote.

Most people buy the meme that the US has an overblown military budget because it's a prevalent trope in movies/shows and because when they see the raw number they fail to account for how stupidly enormous the US federal budget is. If you told them it was only around 11ish percent and that most of that was boring stuff like troop salaries they wouldn't believe you. They simply see the cost of a new drone and fail to appreciate the vast sum of money that could be recouped from the tech.

Edit: Since the point score on this comment has oscillated up and down fairly quickly, here is a link from the World Bank detailing both total military spending and spending relative to gdp for various/most countries. A lack of consensus is fine but opinions should be informed when possible: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS

But the point that Palantir will still have a big pool of money to play with regardless of who is in power is completely valid. Over 80% of Democrats (in both the House and Senate) voted to approve the 2020 defense budget. I believe the numbers were similar in 2019 too. They may talk a big game about cutting funding, but I will believe it when I see it.

Why are you comparing defense spending to a pension fund (SS)? Hardly seems appropriate. Having a bunch of old people around is expensive. Are you suggesting that we should go back to letting them starve when they get too old to work or die young because they can't afford medical care?

Better comparisons are Police ($100B) and prisons ($80B) but really you should be looking at spending as a percent of GDP. Defense is about 3% of GDP.

So we spend (nominally) 7% of our GDP to take care of our elderly. We spend (nominally again) 3% to police the world. No other country comes close to us in military spending but we probably make more from our empire than it costs for us to maintain it. At least so long as we don't get into too many stupid wars (cough cough Iraq).

I can see what we get for SS and Medicare and I'm fine with the taxes to support it. I'd feel a lot better about the military spending if less went to crazy boondoggles like the F-22. It feels like a giant waste -- we shipped all our factories to China and none of this crazy fancy tech is going to help us if we get in a fight with them.

Palantir feels like it might be another boondoggle but I've seen a bit of it at a large company I work with and it actually solves some real problems. It appears to be a slick integration of Spark and Git. It has some potential to solve problems that they haven't been able to touch in the 10 years I've been contracting for them.

On the flip side, Social Security and Medicare have dedicated revenue streams which are meant to cover their costs. In the 1980s, a budget deal was arranged where Social Security would move from being a pay as you go arrangement to actually collecting more money than necessary with the deal being that the Federal government would borrow money from that SS surplus to cover, among other things, Reagan's tax cuts. Because of the way the accounting is done, the surplus from SS payroll taxes is then converted into Treasury bonds. A similar situation exists with Medicare. Because of this, an argument could be (and has been made), that SS/Medicare are not really a part of the Federal government.

The statement that defense is the largest discretionary part of the federal government is an indisputable fact.

Isn't both Social Security and Medicare paid for by their own specific taxes though (and the trust fund if it exists in case of SS)?

Spending on the overall “war machine” is split up into a number of buckets, specifically so that people like you can misleadingly point at one of them and say “that’s it, that’s the whole thing”, when in fact the military industrial complex milks taxpayers for well over a trillion each year in total: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tom-dispatch-ameri...