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Comment by newaccount2021 | Hacker News Reader

newaccount2021

Our military budget is substantially larger today than it was when we were actively engaged in both Iraq and Afghanistan just a few short years ago

Our military budget will soon pass $1 trillion annually

Our elected representatives now routinely provide the Pentagon with more money than it even requests

Every NYTimes article on Ukraine is riddled with comments suggesting we provide a blank check for weaponry

The Washington Post likes to tell me every day why it is essential the US build more $15 billion aircraft carriers to provoke China

This is just one reason why we have poverty and always will

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Military spending as a percent of GDP has been steadily declining, especially after Iraq: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?name_...

The US government already spends more on healthcare and social security than on the military.

Most of that military spending is salaries for US workers. Guess where that $15 billion carrier is getting built? In the US from US parts. Its a jobs programs that conservative senators can support.

Fungible, budgetable, money is not spent on social security. Social security is funded by it's own tax, and is it's own account. Measuring it against voluntary expenditures chosen by congress is inaccurate.

Money can be borrowed with interest from social security, and while paying down that interest is closer to a voluntary expense, it is still a much more serious decision than simply deciding not to do so.

People in poverty aren't paying any taxes to fund any of that though. As the article somewhat noted, people in poverty get an average of $12,400 from the government annually. (Excluding Medicaid, which is much more spending, but even poor people do pay a small amount into that.)

57% of people pay no income tax.[1] The carriers and planes are essentially only being paid for by the top 40% of earners.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/25/57percent-of-us-households-p...

It’s not just about who’s funding the military, it’s about misuse of resources. If that same money was spent building out our public transit, food production or community improvement, we’d see an improvement in the lives of US citizens up and down the socioeconomic ladder. The reality is we spend our resources building weapons that only have a negative impact on humanity, producing nothing.

How much of this spending is really about creating defense jobs in the various representatives districts? Here is an article that argues defense spending is a form of indirect welfare.

Abstract: this article, we present a new theory that, given the economic consequences of military spending, some governments may use military spending as a means of advancing their domestic non-military objectives. Based on evidence that governments can use military spending as welfare policy in disguise, we argue that the role of ideology in shaping military spending is more complicated than simple left-right politics. We also present a theory that strategic elites take advantage of opportunities presented by international events, leading us to expect govermments that favor more hawkish foreign policy policies to use low-level international conflicts as opportunities for increasing military spending. Using pooled time-series data from 19 advanced democracies in the post-World War I period, we find that government ideology, measured as welfore and

https://www.jstor.org/stable/25766258

Finance <- Industry <- Military <- Budget <- Politics <- Lobying <- Industry <- Finance

Money is always the culprit.

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