Cheap balloon vs expensive missile, seems a good way to bankrupt us by sending continuous balloons.
We're at risk of bankruptcy because our debt is 31 trillion dollars and in June we won't even be able to issue securities to continue bullshitting ourselves out of cutting spending. Welcome to America, we're broke because we spent all our money on guns rather than infrastructure, healthcare and education.
This sentiment is completely untrue. Defense is approximately 12% of US government spending, healthcare approximately 24%, education approximately 15%, and social security roughly 20%. Infrastructure is harder to categorize, but the truth is that the US government spends at least 4x more on healthcare, education and welfare (combined) than defense.
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2023USrn_...
The fact that this 12% of government spending amounts to the largest military on earth is in large part a consequence of the fact that the US is really, enormously wealthy compared to most of the rest of the world, has a fairly large population, and still has a larger GDP per capita than any other large or even medium-sized country.
And we’re terrible at all three vs nations that spend fractions less…
The 80's were much, much worse. If we were ever going to go bankrupt, it was in the early Clinton administration due to the Reagan/Bush spending boom. We got through just fine. Those bonds were all paid off decades ago.
Be very very very cautious any time someone comes at you with this kind of hyperbole about federal debt. They're selling you something.
It makes more sense when you consider how many programs we have—a pretty high percentage of our population is covered by public spending, and—crucially—the ones who are are in some cases among the most expensive to care for.
1) Medicare (old or disabled)
2) Medicaid (poor)
3) Tricare or whatever they call it now, since I think the name changed (active and IIRC retired-with-full-benefits military and their spouses and kids, at least for the active-duty ones, can't recall if that part carries over in retirement)
4) VA (military veterans, including those with short terms of service)
5) Federal employees
6) State employees
7) County employees
8) City employees
9) Cops and firefighters and such, if not covered under any of the above.
10) School district employees (there are lots of these)
Not all of these are cases in which all the spending is covered by public money, but some of them are, and in other cases a great deal of it is. Also I've probably missed some programs.
[EDIT] Oh and that's not counting public money that goes to private companies but ends up paying for healthcare for those companies' employees and families, who are employed expressly to work on those publicly-funded projects—I can see arguments either way for counting that, depends on what you're trying to understand.
I'm surprised this seems to be such a common point. Why is it believed that it was cheap?
It's also possible whomever is running this operation doesn't care about their staff at all and they just use hydrogen.