All spending everywhere is essentially “salaries and compensation”. It’s not like you get to the end of the supply chain and suddenly are paying God. Money always goes to people.
Also, even if you're right, the "salaries and compensation" of anyone outside the U.S. are effectively NOT that, since the thing in question is whether defense spending is mostly a jobs program.
That's debatable. Without the labor input the product doesn't exist as far as the market knows. However, if you want to discount the labor portion, which is an equally valid take, it remains that what was said was “salaries and compensation”. Any compensation you receive for giving up the gold in your possession was already recognized. As said earlier, the exchanged value doesn't go to God, it goes to people.
> since the thing in question is whether defense spending is mostly a jobs program.
You can certainly play a game of semantics here, but generally "job" in this type of context refers to any kind of economic role, not necessarily direct labor. "It is my job to provide gold to the world" doesn't imply that you are the one doing the actual extraction. The significance of "job programs" is in offering opportunity to derive an income, not to give opportunity to strain muscles.
No, almost all of it would cover your labor.
What you are describing is winning the lottery, which isn't really useful since it is a rounding error of possible scenarios. A "Having a career is meaningless because you can just win the lotto instead" kind of scenario.
In reality you would be digging for ages in your yard to find a nugget of gold. If you went to a place with gold to dig, you would be a gold miner, and no, it's not easy money, go ask them.
But the confusion is that somehow, money not spent on “salaries and compensation” doesn’t go to people. All of it goes to people.
Defense spending isn’t buying “defense”, it’s buying time and effort for people to focus on and produce defense related things. This is the root of the original post that defense spending is a jobs program.
That's just straight up false.
It goes to legal entities, some of which are people.
Companies aren't people mate, and neither are investment funds.
The money might still be managed by people, but that cannot be called salary, even if you're stretching the definition.
Would you agree if I reworded my statement to “ultimately, all money eventually flows to people, whether for their labor or due to their ownership of the entities receiving the money”?
So yes, all transactions can be linked be back to individuals, if you ignore all details and make some gigantic leaps of faith... But what's the insight?
Are we just doing philosophy like in ancient Greece?
It’s not an obvious stimulus for US citizens, and in fact taking resources that would benefit other US ventures.