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Comment by this_user | Hacker News Reader

Sure, just handing out money to everyone is easy. The hard part is finding enough money to do it.

We spend $850B on defense, and nobody ever asks where the money to do it comes from. It's only once you start talking about feeding people that everybody is concerned with the economics.

Exactly this! National defense is a sovereign need but it should not be above scrutiny for how the money is spent.

Add to this the fact that the US Military is effectively a jobs program and there's little to no domestic return on that investment.

This subject gets artfully deflected by "We love our troops!" nonsense but if anybody is complaining about government spending they should be willing to look at all facets of it regardless of which side of the aisle they're on.

Far from above scrutiny, the military budget has been the go-to talking point and area for real actual cuts my entire adult life. While it's share of the national budget has gone down, spending has only increased in other areas to more than compensate for it. I can't really say the increased spending on social services has resulted in great gains for societal health, education outcomes, or really anything.

Not everything can be explained by budget percentages, but on the face of it redirecting military spending to other areas has not resulted in many large wins for society as a whole so far.

It likely didn't have to be this way, but we apparently are really bad at deploying tax dollars into socially meaningful infrastructure. That and there are larger factors at play.

It's been talked about (because it should be!) but not enough has changed. I remember the years in a row of the pentagon budget audit just completely being unable to account for billions of dollars and then everyone just moving on after realizing there's no way to enforce it without Congress and they made it clear where the money comes from (and where it goes).

I commiserate, yet it's way more than $850B. Current spending for fiscal year 2025 was $1.5T (Trillion). It's the Unreported Data* tab. Clearer if you click one month back on 10.

[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

Per the same USA Spending .gov site, military spending by year has been:

  2024: $1,358,253,371,219     14.03%
  2023: $1,297,012,666,574     13.90%
  2022: $1,160,975,500,606     12.85%
  2021: $1,117,832,172,120     11.11%
  2020: $1,098,916,637,102     12.03%
  2019: $1,060,561,779,405     15.97%
  2018:   $995,628,286,613     15.77%
  2017:   $931,355,381,711     15.39%

It's supposedly "the official open data source of federal spending information"

Not only that, but ensuring that someone else did not claim the money owed to another. Look at how rampant income tax return fraud is in the US, and that's just bad actors claiming tax refunds on the behalf of others.

There is always enough money to build bombs, but never enough money to feed and house everyone. It’s almost like governments can just create money out of nowhere to do whatever they want.

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