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Comment by Grakel | Hacker News Reader

Meh. Is government expenditure bad? The money flows into the economy and technology is researched and developed.

It's not like the money would be spent elsewhere, it's all debt we're just going to hold on to until inflation renders it irrelevant.

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If you're going to be spending billions of dollars, would you rather have a working ship afterwards, or not? Accountability DOES matter.

Look up the economist Basquiat: you can raise the GDP by tossing bricks through windows — money will be spent replacing /repairing them which contributes to the GDP.

But that same money could have been spent differently on things people like, or invested.

These ships, and the structure of military spending, is more like Basquiat’s example.

There's another way to frame that argument. The spike in window repairs and glass demand will incentivize glass factories to invest in technological advancements to make cheaper and better glass. Investments they would not have made otherwise because there wasn't enough demand to spread the fixed investment cost across and make it profitable. After all the windows are repaired, the glass factories still retain their capital investment and technical knowledge, are producing glass cheaper than before, out-competing their counterparts abroad, and maintaining a global technological lead in glass production.

Bastiat's parable doesn't account for the sticky effects of capital investment. The glass makers in his stories only replace windows with old techniques and never use the spike in demand as an opportunity for technological development.

It distorts investment away from the direction people would otherwise prefer to invest in.

There's a global debate happening today about whether complete free market allocation of investment is best, or whether East Asian state-lead investments into technological advancements is. If the free market was all we need, then why should the government invest into scientific research?

That debate has gone on since the 17th century at least. Obviously neither extremum is effective.

Under this logic, the US should also be evacuating cities like Los Angeles & New York on a regular basis and nuking them till there is nothing left.

After all, it would spur the development of decontamination as well as speedy construction wouldn't it?

Currently the US has spurred the development of military technology by fighting a 20 year war. It's just that the destruction has happened on a non-electorate population. LA and NYC vote.

Planned obsolescence is also a form of this. Why build a phone that lasts 10 years when you build one that lasts 4, convince people to throw away perfectly working phones, and funnel the additional annual sales volume into technological research?

A 20 year war? The US has been fighting pretty much nonstop for the last 80 years.

In San Francisco, people aren’t surprised to have cars broken into multiple times a year at this point. The only change I’ve seen is more auto glass repair companies. Sometimes we are stuck with “perverse incentive”

> There's another way to frame that argument. The spike in window repairs and glass demand will incentivize glass factories to invest in technological advancements to make cheaper and better glass.

This is so, but that cheaper and better glass is unlikely to be tougher and less prone to breaking.

since the money would be spent elsewhere, doesn’t it have a neutral effect on GDP?

The point is that GDP is unidimensional metric that fails to capture a lot of valuable info.

First of all is money spent on equipment to kill people. Second, it's money that is not spent on things that really matter, like education, health care, green energy, etc.

very little of it is actual weapons thar sboot at people. most is detterence, and thr actual killing things are cheap like drones.

Exactly: US President Eisenhower said in a 1953 speech,

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.

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwighteisenhowercr...

Money spent on equipment to discourage China from killing people.

Government expenditure in general isn’t bad… if it delivers on what it’s trying to. Like it’s great we get the research and tech benefits (if that’s really what happens) but if we’re unable to deliver on producing best in class armaments, we risk falling behind adversaries that do develop those capabilities.

Yes, absolutely.

There are better things to spend it on: infrastructure, education, health, space, and more

Government money isn't finite and doesn't get shuffled from budget to budget in some sort of rational discussion. It's all just numbers and politics.

Generally overbudget projects have other consequences of poor planning such as technical defects. See big dig, F35 helmet annoxia issue.

The greater the government expenditure, the greater the taxes.

That's not literally true, obviously. There's plenty of money for them to go after if they were actually worried about government debt. I think the big secret is that it doesn't really matter as long as the debt growth rate doesn't become shocking.

No, the real secret is that the US government controls dollar creation. At the sign of any problem in the economy, they create more cash and give it to bankers, who on their turn put it in the hands of investors, who use it to buy assets around the world, increasing the assets and profits of American businesses. That's why the US will use any dirt trick to maintain the dollar supremacy.

If our money was actually backed by something, maybe. As it stands though the government doesn't really need to tax more money to spend more, even banks are allowed to create money for free now.

Govt spending creates inflation which is a tax on everyone. Sometimes its obvious, like Quantirative Easing, and sometimes it's subtle, like wasting human labor and natural resources on worthless stuff/activity instead of value creation. Formal taxation just redistributes the pain.

It could go to a Basic Income for all low income Americans.

They could do both. Government money isn't finite, that's my point. They certainly would never have a meeting where they said, ok we cut a trillion from the military, what should we move it to? It doesn't work like that.

It could also be returned to the taxpayers. Instead of inventing new ways to spend money, the government could just stop taking so much from the people who earned it.

    At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

This reminds of the Feynman quote about outsiders to a field making obvious statements a about an intellectual idea and thinking they had a clever insight.

I'm sorry, I don't see your connection. It was a snide aside by an economist (I believe a Nobel winning one), but it wasn't dumb.

It's taking money away from the people who sacrificed a part of their life for it and giving it to people who place zero importance on it....

It's literally parasitic.

Are you serious?

Taxes don't equal government expenditure. It's not a inflow-outflow system.

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