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Comment by ak_111 | Hacker News Reader

Profiteering from the military industrial complex is a much more subtle art than that. There are many sophisticated (and readable) studies about it which you can read.

Sometimes it is not even that subtle. Just take a few minutes to read about Blackwater.

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There is profiteering, as with any large industry, especially government-backed ones with near-guaranteed payouts.

But what’s the scale of it? Is it enough to bring down the whole US?

My answer is not even close.

See my other comment. There is no way to get a scale of it since it is not audited. All we see is the public debt ballooning while infrastructure around us is decaying. Where is the money going?

The deficit since October is roughly the same as all defense expenditures: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio... So even if they went to zero and didn’t have any effect on revenue, we’d still end up the year with debt ballooning. The lion share of expenditures are non-discretionary, and public debt increase is largely determined by demographics and interest rates.

> There is no way to get a scale of it since it is not audited.

Pretty boring talking point, since it's mostly audited - the various secret programs are very small in comparison to public ones.

> Where is the money going?

Giant majority goes to various social and medical programs, that only baloon from aging of society and prolonged lifespans without extending workspan.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/2023_US_...

So, in short - pensioners eat all the money.

But we can look at the audited public filings of the defense contractors. And their numbers are really kind of reasonable.

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