Hacker News Reader

Comment by ArchieScrivener | Hacker News Reader

The USA showed itself to be a Command Economy that uses 'private enterprise' as a fascade of legitimacy during Covid. Without government spending, employment, and contracts, the USA would be net negative growth.

Now the DoD, who are by far the largest budgetary expense for the tax payer, wants us to believe they don't have a better Ai than current industry? That is a double sword admission; either they are exposing themselves again as economic decision makers, or admitting they spend money on routine BS with zero frontier war fighting capabilities.

Either way, it is beyond time to reform the Military and remove the majority of its leadership as incompetent stewards and strategists. That doesn't even include the massive security vulnerabilities in our supply chains given military needs in various countries. (Taiwan and Thailand)

View on HN

The US would not be net negative growth without government spending. Other components of GDP grow a lot, outside of recessions.

Sure if you immediately stopped government spending today we'd have negative growth today but that's not because other things aren't growing, it's because you just removed part of the base that existed last year. That would be true of literally pretty much any economy ever, or anything that's growing and you decided to remove a chunk of the base from.

And yes I absolutely believe the government does not have better generative AI than Anthropic or its competitors.

Covid shutdown should have killed our economy, nothing short of government spending prevented otherwise.

So many people in the US live a paycheck to paycheck lifestyle, that the covid lockdowns without government spending would have likely devolved into zombie apocalypse territory where hungry people were ransacking homes in more affluent neighborhoods (yes, even occupied homes). This is why people also bought lots of guns and ammo during Covid. You may think those people are crackpots, but I feel we actually got very close to it happening.

My local food bank (big city) ran out of supplies just as they announced the first waves of stimulus or whatever they called it (the weekly checks). So I’m pretty sure we were literally only days away from that being a reality.

Do you think the food bank gives you all of your meals everyday? One day not open and people are eating each other.

They wouldn't ransack home in rich neighbourhoods for food for a million reasons (too far, too weak, roads are closed, rich homes have security, rich people have as much food at home or less compared to an average person). They would break into the supermarkets first, then each others homes around them before what was left would organize and go searching.

The checks helped and were the right call but we weren't close to a zombie outbreak.

I think it would devolve quickly and probably super markets would fall first, but let’s not pretend like you know exactly how it would play out after that. I live in a large metro and super markets run empty a few times a year (usually weather panics), so that isn’t a lasting source of loot. I wasn’t pretending that I knew exactly who would get targeted by it first, just that I know I’m the type of target I discuss and it’s for the same reason my neighborhood is a destination on Halloween; full sized candy bars.

Would love for you to tell me how close we were from it or how many days without food/work/income a large portion of our population could endure before they “would organize and go searching” - which by the way is exactly what I’m talking about.

At some point in the not so distant future, it seems entirely likely for the US to bail out OpenAI / Nvidia / etc using national security as justification. Democrats and Republicans really can get along as long as their donors get what they want. No matter how the regime changes in the coming years, the DoD will keep getting funding, and that funding will increasingly go to vendors who don't mind killing people.

Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, and 60 years later it's eating everyone's lunch.

> who are by far the largest budgetary expense for the tax payer

not even top 3

Let me guess without looking up, debt interest, gov pension, medicare?

Close, DHS, SSA, then Treasury.

You are 100% wrong. You listed entitlements. National Defense is half of all discretionary spending.

Homeland Security is less than 1/6th the budget of DoD alone.

That's a typo, dhhs.

Regardless it's not an inaccurate breakdown of where your tax dollars go.

>or admitting they spend money on routine BS with zero frontier war fighting capabilities.

Trying to imagine somebody that doesn’t know that the military buys dumb stuff and for some reason a human doesn’t come to mind. I keep picturing a horse

> The USA showed itself to be a Command Economy that uses 'private enterprise' as a fascade of legitimacy during Covid.

This is the case for every government/nation in the world. The difference between communism and capitalism, is that the Politburo in capitalism allows the natural selection of elites based on their performance on an open economy. At least that was the case until 2011.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com