If the US had spent as much on defense as the UK since 1950, the total gov debt would be $3.7 trillion

Unfortunately we've chosen to be the military for the entire western world. UK and others can cut their military spending knowing that the big, bad USA has their back.

Now calculate the debt if we had stopped social security and never instituted "Great Society" programs.

I bet we would be in the black.

Really, you have assumed something that you probably have not realized. Say you paid a soldier $25,000, and he paid US taxes of $1000 and spent money on rent which was income for someone else and they paid taxes on that income. What about the purchase of the food for the soldier, where did that come from and what about the planes purchased and built by, say, Boeing, with the wages paid to the workers ...

It is not nearly as simple as you make it out to be. Which, of course, is why the notion that the budget deficit of a Trillion ++ dollars was only a deficit without any other effects, including higher levels of economic activity (and taxes paid) and fewer transfers for unemployment, etc.

The defense industry keeps millions of people employed with well-paying jobs. One of the benefits of the industry itself is to maintain a strong industrial base in the USA.

Remember, it's the one industry that DOESN'T OUTSOURCE.

Yeah, and the world would also be nucleared.

blue dawgs wrote:

The defense industry keeps millions of people employed with well-paying jobs. One of the benefits of the industry itself is to maintain a strong industrial base in the USA.

Remember, it's the one industry that DOESN'T OUTSOURCE.

Guns vs butter, bro. take a basic economics class. the american military is the least efficient job producer in the history of the world. that 2% of our GDP every year for the last 60 years could have gone towards something productive instead of something destructive. tanks are not as productive as tractors. nuclear weapons are not as productive as nuclear reactors. we could have had lower taxes or universal health care or something that we could have used to make our economy grow. the military is a dead end. Great Society programs at least gave money back to Americans. Military programs napalmed medieval Vietnamese villages and empower opium producing Afghani warlords. ask yourself where we would be with 16 fewer nuclear submarines, 3 fewer aircraft carriers, 100 fewer army bases position around the world, 200 fewer generals? it could not be any worse. this is the waste republicans are talking about, there just not calling it by its name. Milton Friedman agrees with me.

TCB wrote:

I ran some numbers. If starting in 1950, the US government had spent the same amount of its national income as the UK (averaging 5.3% of GDP instead of 7.3%) the national debt would be about $3.7 trillion. It would actually be a lot lower since I didn't account for the interest on the debt. This is also assuming that tax rates, economic growth, and other spending would have remained the same, which would have been unlikely since we would have had a negative debt through most of the 70s. If you want to reduce the size of government, try cutting the most wasteful (and literally destructive) part of it. Those who want to destroy America have succeeded by making us do it to ourselves.

Yes, and we would be speaking Russian right now.

we still would have had a few thousand nukes to prevent that from happening. some general recently said that all we need is like 390. im not saying we should have gotten rid of the military, we just could have spent much less to achieve the same outcomes. if the UK can defend itself spending 5.3% of its GDP on the military, than so can we. Milton Friedman was advocating getting rid of a standing army during the 60s. even i think that is crazy.

Butter probably kills more people than guns every year. But butter is soft and tastes good, and guns are hard. Gun workers are likely higher skilled than butter workers though.

But seriously-

I've taken plenty of economics courses, which is why I can look at the defense industry as providing value to the economy as a relative "constant". Sure, it comes from the tax base. But again, it provides well-paying jobs throughout the country. These jobs don't get sent overseas at the whim of the executives (at least they haven't yet).

I didn't say it was an efficient industry relative to the product quantities it produces though. Obviously, the costs are certainly very high for many of the high-profile programs. But people are working throughout, and in turn buying things with their paychecks and paying taxes [back].

And when times get bad for automotive companies, general engineering firms, computer engineering firms, etc, where do these guys often find jobs? With the defense industry. And good occasionally does dribble out of the industry; the most popular example being that the R&D for what ultimately became the internet came from the defense sector 4 decades ago.

Do you think the massive influx of government-funded "universal healthcare" workers is going to be an efficient use of our money? Ugh. I hate to even think about it. We'll simply be funding lower-skilled, lower-salaried workers to be inefficient. Oh, but "hey, it's all in an effort to take care of Mr and Mrs Fatass" (that don't take care of themselves because there's no incentive to). How's the DMV near you? How's that road construction work going near you? Real efficient, I presume? Anything with the government involved is going to operate very slowly and inefficient.

[/quote]

Guns vs butter, bro. take a basic economics class. the american military is the least efficient job producer in the history of the world. that 2% of our GDP every year for the last 60 years could have gone towards something productive instead of something destructive. tanks are not as productive as tractors. nuclear weapons are not as productive as nuclear reactors. we could have had lower taxes or universal health care or something that we could have used to make our economy grow. the military is a dead end. Great Society programs at least gave money back to Americans. Military programs napalmed medieval Vietnamese villages and empower opium producing Afghani warlords. ask yourself where we would be with 16 fewer nuclear submarines, 3 fewer aircraft carriers, 100 fewer army bases position around the world, 200 fewer generals? it could not be any worse. this is the waste republicans are talking about, there just not calling it by its name. Milton Friedman agrees with me.[/quote]

It was that paranoic fear that kept the US pumping crazy dollar after crazy dollar into defense. There was always some big bad wolf waiting to blow the American house down. We realise now that the Russians could not have even fed themselves without imports of wheat.

The coalition of US/UK went into Iraq because of the threat of weapons of mass destruction. There are more arms in an average US gunshop than they found there. Millions/trillions spent to make rich the friends of Rumsfield and Cheney.

It is about time the US realised that it is not the World's policemen, more correct vigilante. It should look after its own problems before applying armed intervention where it is neither wanted nor required in other parts of the World.

I am sure that all my neighbours do not share my politics but I do not violently occupy their houses because they organize their families differently.

Why is the US in Afghanistan?

You're also assuming that in any of those years, if we weren't spending that money, that we wouldn't have spent any of it on something else, which is unlikely.

Seems to me that a lot of runners are libtards.

There is some waste in the military for sure and spending there should be scrutinized, but we do get something back from it in the form of national security and world security.

What have we gotten back from all the social programs that we have spent much more on than the military (our biggest budget item isn't the military)? Just a bunch of more people who are dependent on the government.

Social spending by the government is theivery because it is a forced redistribution of wealth that only benefits some. National security benefits all.

I’m afraid an awful lot of British ‘defence’ spending is totally wasted.

I could go into chapter and verse, but I’m a bit baffled about where the figures, for instance, of US defence spending come from - and do they reflect the true expenditure involved.

Wasn’t it the unforeseen costs of the Vietnam war the period when the US economy started to turn from black into red.

I’ve seen the bill (so far) for the Iraq campaign is about $700billion - and heavens knows how much the final cost of the Afghanistan war will come to.

Is that reflected in the defence budget?

American occupation forces certainly don’t come cheap.

Where armies once simply had baggage trains and camp followers, (I’m reading an excellent book right now about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia) - the modern American carry just not backpacks on their backs, they demand a total, transplantable society right down to PXs, massage parlors, food courts, miniature golf courses, Burger Kings, Subway sandwich shops, assorted cafes, general stores, Cold Mountain Creamerys and on and on.

Even sand was imported from UAE and Qatar to build ‘blast walls’ in Iraq as the local sand didn’t meet the requirements.

As with America, Britain is bankrupt, depending on borrowing just to cover government expenditure and is looking for ‘cuts’ in government expenditure in all areas of the economy, including defence.

I guarantee, with us, we’ll throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Incidentally, countries like Germany and Japan, secure under US protection since the War, were able to spend on building up their industrial economy, rather than waste money on the military.

American defense spending will always be higher than your average European country due to the cultures involved. A great many American right-wingers have the same attitude and 'pride' in military strength as Britain had in the hayday of its global empire. This attitude, at least in part, spreads its way up to the highest echelons of power. There's also the indomitable threat of "the other" stemming back to the dark days of McCarthy that doesn't exist to the same extent in Europe. There was a debate only a few days ago in parliament discussing possible cuts to the military and the controversies involved. Do we really need a next-gen nuclear weapon when we already have an old, but competent, one? There were quite a few inferences to us needing to ditch our 'americanised' pride in military and navy strength beyond its point of value (although I'd argue its more a hangover of our imperial days).

You realize both Social Security and Medicare have both brought in significantly more money than they have spent? Getting rid of them would have hurt the budget as we would have had to borrow at higher rates. But please don\'t let reality intefer with your world view.

luv2run wrote:

Now calculate the debt if we had stopped social security and never instituted \"Great Society\" programs.

I bet we would be in the black.

And we'd all be speaking Russian...end of thread you ignoramous...

WWRD... wrote:

And we'd all be speaking Russian...end of thread you ignoramous...

christ, someone already posted that same exact thing. you are really dumb.

50% of federal spending was on defense under JFK, today it's 20% of federal spending.

Our economy is so large we can afford it.

We've also built a huge part of our economy around defense.