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Comment by Anon4Now | Hacker News Reader

I feel for you, but military spending is a massive federal jobs program. Each job created has a job multiplier effect, creating additional jobs in the surrounding area. Manufacturing jobs producing military equipment have a much bigger job multiplier effect. So if you were to wave a magic wand and half military spending overnight, the economic impact would be disastrous, and many more people would be in dire economic situations.

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That doesn't seem to be an issue for other Western countries with much smaller militaries (per capita).

We have the US for that military thing.

I find it interesting that this argument is only ever being made when there is talk about cutting military spending. Somehow it is never the problem that there is job losses when other spending (in particular social spending) is being cut.

There was actually a great response by a member of the German Labour Party (SPD) in the discussion about the spending on the Eurofighter project (sometime in the 90s IIRC). His response to the jobs argument was: We could also build a pyramid in honour of Helmut Kohl and it would create a lot of jobs, that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Yeah it’s a ridiculous argument. The money being spent on those jobs is taken by force (which has an unmeasurable chilling effect on the economy), and then allocated according to central planning, inevitably in a way far less efficient than the market would.

So what if we used military construction money on schools and education? Or maybe capturing carbon? Plenty of useful things to the world we could spend the money on. No need to just cut spending and bank the money.

My comment was in reply to the GP's statement that it was a waste of money. When the federal government gives out money, it has a ripple effect as that money is spent on goods and services. Creating a service-based job will have a larger ripple effect, and creating a manufacturing job generally has the largest ripple effect.

So if you have a magic wand or just happen to become dictator, please keep in mind the multiplier effects when deciding where to spend the money. ;-)

Couldn't we use that money to create jobs that have a more meaningful impact on people's day to day? Invest in alternative energy, fixing our infrastructure, improving public transit, etc... Put that investment in technology into technology that is more productive instead of the nth iteration of some piece of military technology that we'll never use.

I want that sweet high-speed rail, baby!

That would cool, but it would be a multi-year, probably multi-decade process. Not overnight.

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