Interesting article on defense spending. Cutting foreign aid, medicare/medicade, social security, increasing taxes on the rich, and a number of other initiatives have been proposed in order to reduce the deficit, but few calls have been made to reduce defense spending. I guess my question is why? Link
Pigs are now sacred? I thought that was confined to cows to India. Muslims and Jews across the world will be shocked to discover they have been sleeping with Porky Pig. :grin:
War is an economic driver. Always has been. Always will be. The defense budget involves about a bajillion different industries that have tons of influence, and it is hard to get those people to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it. Ike was right.
Maybe it is an economic driver, but if that is so true, why then is our military spending driving our economy to the toilet instead of Shangrila?
War is an economic driver, not defense spending... the spending is an economic driver up to the point where the spending becomes unnecessary. After that point, it becomes waste... and you wind up with a bunch of people attached to that waste... claiming that they're necessary, when they really aren't... going into debt to fight world war 3? totally necessary... short term economic failboat, long term economic win.... going into debt to do what we're doing now? hell no. The "wars" we're fighting are not worth the effort, let alone the budget we're paying for them... we've bloated our military budget past the point of necessity/usefulness... all in the name of what seems like perpetual "war" and maintaining a global military presence.... it's that whole "we don't need a stealth bomber to fight terrorism" debate... but the contractors and DoD convince themselves they do... because you gotta keep that money flowing, otherwise people in the defense industry lose jobs, and we can't have that, can we? It's an economic driver, when it isn't corrupted and overused to the point of absolute exhaustion with the benefits funneled very much to a specific group of people.
How many empires collapsed through out the history due to excessive military spending? Hopefully we do not follow in their footsteps.
I don't think it's driving our economy into the toilet (that would be due to a recent rather large scale wall-street hose-up), but it is driving the deficit. The two are somewhat related (see the S&P thread), but fundamentally DoD spending is a key part of our "free market" economy, as are subsidies to agribusiness and publicly funded research for pharmaceutical corporations. Those are the three government funded pillars of our "capitalism".
I think my pseudo rhetorical point missed it's mark, but I agree with both of you, including your original post, DM. Therein lies the rub.
Nothing is like Medicare and Medicaid or social security in that our obligations increase with time to amounts that we cannot possibly pay. They will cost much more in dollars and in % of GDP than current or even projected military spending. So they are a much larger problem that needs to be solved sooner.
Wars being good for the economy is a notion thats propogated for some time, but the reality is that the jury's still out as to whether or not war is a true economic driver. Proponents of this position often cite job creation that results in the aftermath of war as sufficient proof of war's ability to enliven a stale economy, but the flaws of this logic have been debunked by the Broken Window Fallacy: I do agree with you that one of the largest problems we're facing when it comes to defense spending is the sheer size of the industry and the number of stakeholders involved in the process, particularly contractors. I think another factor that prevents politicians from ever supporting substantial budget cuts for Defense and Defense-related agencies (DHS, TSA, etc.) is a political one. How can a politician ever defend him/herself against accusation of being 'weak' on national security? It's a losing position. And should another attack happen, the politician's career would be over. So rather than objectively evaluating industries that are heavily funded and providing little added security, we continue to add restrictions, fund institutions to enforce security measures related to those restrictions, and thinking up the next hypothetical security threat that we can protect against. At some point, the spending is going to have to be curbed, and personally, I think it would add a lot of credibility to the republican position of 'cutting government spending' if they were willing to make substantive defense budget cuts.
Well, I guess that depends on how much the US continues to spend towards the defense budget. According to the Congressional Budget Office, defense spending grew 9% annually on average from fiscal year 2000–2009. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has a great breakdown on the total budget from fiscal year 2010 and how its been broken down: -Defense and security: In 2010, some 20 percent of the budget, or $705 billion, paid for defense and security-related international activities. -Social Security: Another 20 percent of the budget, or $707 billion, paid for Social Security, which provided retirement benefits averaging $1,175 per month to 34.6 million retired workers in December 2010. -Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP: Three health insurance programs — Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) — together accounted for 21 percent of the budget in 2010, or $732 billion. As you can see, the defense budget is virtually the same as the social security budget and the medicare/medicaid budget. When politicians rail against social security, medicare/medicaid, and a variety of other government spending areas (NPR, foreign aid, etc.) and remain silent on defense, in my opinion, it undermines their credibility.
I guessed you missed the point of my post. Medicare and SS are legally obligated to increase in cost at a greater and greater rate. Understand?
The last president to stand up to the military industrial and talked of ending the federal reserve ended up with his brains on the back of a limo in broad day light. They're the true slave drivers of our country and our public debt. Good luck trimming that cow.
I think he is alluding to our aging population and the effect that will have on said social programs. We can theoretically cut defense spending whenever we want. SS and Medicare? Those are different animals that probably require some sort of fundamental change as they are unsustainable given future age deomgraphics.
We would still have a half trillion dollar deficit if we axed the DoD. I think most are focused on SS and Medicare because we have a fundamental flaw in those systems. As people live longer and the ratio of workers to retirees gets smaller and smaller, they could very well become unsustainable.
SS sort of is - but it's actually a bit more solid than people think. It's certainly scheduled to run out of money in something like 20-30 years, but the trust fund also starts replenishing itself shortly after that. So in theory, it's actually still potentially a viable program and can be fixed fairly easily with minor tweaks if we ever decide to do so (raising retirement age a few years or means-testing it or whatever). Medicare is a whole different beast - not because of anything fundamentally wrong with Medicare itself (it's actually more efficient than private care), but because the cost of health care in general is spiraling out of control. Medicare isn't really a "government spending" problem so much as it is a "national spending" problem. As a country, gov't or not, health care spending is bankrupting us. Unless we address the cost side of health care itself, it will either bankrupt the government or seniors, depending on who has to pay for it. And if we can find a way to address the cost side of health care in general, Medicare fixes itself to a large extent.
