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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

It certainly reads better than "We need to funnel some money to the guys who build the rockets so that, if the Russians get frisky, we can credibly threaten to can end the world."

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Or "99% of US Congressmen own shares in the military–industrial(–congressional) complex, so we need any excuse to funnel $trillions over there"

Man if that's true it really ruined my day. Do you have proof?

It's not true. If it was nearly that simple, it would be a lot easier to fix.

Dingdingding. It's more that military contractors have jobs in literally every district in the country, which makes anything done against them 'hurting jobs', etc. There's a lot of money funneled in that direction, but it isn't because of cronyism or anything- just pure hard corporate strategy choices.

But who would fix that problem? Congress?

We're talking about changing fundamental aspects of our society, not patching some code.

It would require a massive cultural shift, on a number of levels.

Kevin, we are not in Kansans (or Memphis) anymore!

Top 100 Defense Contractors (most privately owned) 2007: [1]

Further, histories like the one with Chertoff [2] makes U.S. politics really a dirty place: spend trillions of scared US tax payers' money on frying them with cancer in the name of fight on terror with Al Qaeda (quick hint: while we fight them here in US (and of course spend most of your tax money on it), we ally with them somewhere else at the same time [3]).

[1] http://www.govexec.com/magazine/2007/08/top-100-defense-cont...

[2] http://gawker.com/5437499/why-is-michael-chertoff-so-excited...

[3] http://www.redstate.com/streiff/2011/03/27/us-allies-with-al...

Do you need proof? If so you can watch the 60 minutes expose on their insider trading: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7388130n/

They don't just do this in the military industrial complex, they do it across the board, making decisions that benefit their portfolios and constructing their portfolios so their decisions get benefits from laws being passed.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/15/ethically-c...

http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/20...

> Do you need proof?

Yes. What kind of a question is this?

I wish they kept dumping more and more money into NASA instead of just directly into the military.

NASA is part of the military-industrial complex.

See the first link joering2 posted. If you look at the top 10 defense contractors you'll find that several of them are also Nasa contractors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NASA_contractors

That's my point, I want as much of the "let's fund the military-industrial complex" money as possible to go to NASA. Right now they're struggling on funding.

It seems like NASA is always "struggling" to get funding, when in reality, there have been very few years when their budget wasn't higher than the previous year[0], even when taking inflation into account.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

And yet there are still science programs canceled half way through development.

The timing doesn't match--this might have been the answer ten years or so earlier--the intercontinental ballistic missiles had long existed in 1970. But, preventing another world war from happening, which is what nuclear rockets did, probably saved many more lives than any humanitarian help could have.

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