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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not the Pentagon's $52,000 trash can, but the US' $858,000,000,000 trash heap which is the defense budget:

other than massive corruption and unaccountable-for assets - the actual delivery of this budget is military intervention, occupation and war-mongering all over the world. Not to mention the danger of nuclear holocaust.

And - almost all members of the congress vote for these monstrosities. Here are the Senate results:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/12/16/moral-and-polit...

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...

very few righteous people in Soddom, and even those - who knows how they would vote if their Nay actually had a chance to block the bill.

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US Military is one of the largest (the largest?) Jobs Creator in the US.

Cities can literally be made or break by the Military (and other Gov functions) moving there or leaving.

A vote against the military is a vote for more unemployment in your district.

Or the government can pay people to build better infrastructure instead.

War is better of course /s

Yes but you can never sell this to the right. You have to package it up into something like "fight the war" or "build a wall" (another useless project that's only meant as a job creation program to boost support in areas where the president needs it). Conservatives and liberals alike agree on job creation programs

> Yes but you can never sell this to the right.

Just don't delude yourself that "the right" is the Republican parties. Both large political parties in the US are staunchly right-wing parties by most criteria.

> Conservatives and liberals alike agree on job creation programs

No, they do not. I mean, they agree on funding large corporations and the military as though that's a job creation program.

A vote of Nay on the military budget is not directly a vote of Aye on infrastructure spending.

Also jobs are not really transferable. So all the military people need to be less mad at you than the infrastructure people are now happy with you; otherwise you lose at re-election.

Like you need to figure out what the transition is from using military as an employment welfare to construction as an employment welfare and why the US will stick to that transition at each phase. That's a lot of work; much easier as a politician to not rock that boat.

Ah yes the ole Broken Window Fallacy rears its ugly head once again.

Broken windows are indeed great business for window repairmen.

If your district has a bunch of window factories; it's probably in your best interest to keep crime high.

Your approach worked rather well for the Germans getting over the economic crisis in the 1930s. The events of the early 1940s, however, gave them cause to reconsider this course of action.

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