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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Make no mistake, the US is a fantastic business. It makes a lot of money, and some people get fantastically rich while others toil for life and hover at the poverty line.

With a vastly higher percentage of its citizens in jail than any other developed country, much higher crime and violence than developed countries and many other very bad indicators it is, however, not a good country. It does not provide for or look after its citizens in the ways other developed countries do, and does not appear to be a healthy society.

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> It does not provide for or look after its citizens in the ways other developed countries do

It's worth asking why.

> NATO nations have cut back on troops and military hardware since the Cold War. But Europe has cut far deeper than the US. Defense budgets have become a pot that could be raided to fund more pressing priorities, such as treating and caring for aging populations. As a result, much of Europe’s military has become, in the view of some US defense experts, a “Potemkin army” that is ill-prepared to wage and win a prolonged war.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-nato-armed-forces/

If we take a look at the % of US forces stationed in Europe, and assume all of them are there only out of the goodness of the US' heart to protect Europeans, and subtract them from total US military costs, it isn't even a drop in the bucket. It's less money than the Pentagon doesn't know what happens to.

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/article/307805...

(This only covers the running costs; even an unfair assumption that the US would need less F-35s and troops if they weren't deployed in Europe, it would still be a drop in the bucket compared to the $916 billion yearly budget).

That’s not a sensible analysis, given how NATO works. It isn’t even difficult to see how misguided that thinking is because you could simply recall the mounting hundreds of billions we’ve lately been sending to two non-NATO nations.

> It isn’t even difficult to see how misguided that thinking is because you could simply recall the mounting hundreds of billions we’ve lately been sending to two non-NATO nations.

Which the US is doing only to protect European country and wouldn't have done it if it were anywhere else? Strongly doubt it. Also it's important to clarify, the US isn't sending "hundreds of billions" to e.g. Ukraine. It's sending material worth that much, which them it replaces (and sometimes it would have had to anyways, in the care of expiring ordinance or obsolete stuff) by paying American companies.

>It's worth asking why.

Because taking care of people is not profitable. Why are people still looking for the answer when it's obvious?

There's 365 million Americans vs. Europeans countries none have more then about 85 million.

No US state has more than 40 million people...

State is not a country and European countries are not states...their federal governments handle their healthcare and etc.

That's my point the US's federal government would be handling free healthcare directly or indirectly thru the states. As well the amount of money Americans would have in their pockets would be a lot less and that's not after over 300 years are what we are use to. Recent election shows the majority does not want change in many regards.

Recent elections show that capital interests are able to spend unlimited amounts of money buying political influence to prevent a pro-working-class candidate from ever touching any true levers of power.

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