You've contradicted yourself in just two paragraphs. First you
describe defense spending as 'preparation for war,' then here you
acknowledge that peace-time spending is the most cost-effective, most
certain way to *avoid* war.
Where is the contradiction in that? War is just the overt form of the
poltical activity that preserves your society at the expense of
others. Being sufficiently well-prepared in peace-time can let you win
the covert war without wasting lives and ammunition.
You have allowed yourself to get hung up on the - largely artificial -
distinction between war and peace.
And isn't that a good thing? Isn't this exactly what we shold be
doing? So surely you must agree that not all defense spending is for
war, but quite the opposite: much is spending to *prevent* war.
Not in your case. Most of your "defence" expenditure is devoted to
keeping defence contractors fat and happy. The problem with defence
expenditures in peace-time is that the military direct their spending
at measures that might have won the last war. Current U.S. military
expenditure is largely devoted to better and more effective weapons,
while what you actually need are stable and tolerably fair governments
in every country around the world.
The attack on the World Trade Centre came out of Saudi Arabia, where
you support a particularly unrepresentative administration that
irritated a number of of its citizens enough to persuade them to
register their dissatisfaction with the country supporting that
administration. We know that you need Saudi oil, but supporting a
medieval monarchy because they will do what you want doesn't seem to
be a stable long-term solution.
Your current administration ignored the message and went after
Afghanistan - the Saudi's were living at the time - then Irak, which
didn't have anything to do with the attack at all. Not exactly goal-
directed behaviour.
And so, this basis all by itself is enough to show it's WRONG for yourwww.warresisters.orgsite to account all defense spending as 'war' spending. Q.E.D.
You haven't demonstrated anything of the kind. You've merely
demonstrated that you don't understand Clausewitz's "political
activity", of which war is merely an occasional extension.
Absolutely not. Defense spending generates a great deal of offsetting
revenue, as detailed above.
The poor pay essentially no federal tax at all, so the dole generates
almost no offsetting revenue...it's a straight payment from tax-payers
to tax-takers.
At least half of the money you describe as "dole" is spent on
administration, which generates precisely the same sort of off-setting
revenue as the bulk of your defence spending.
The remainder of the sums in question go to retired folks, who pay
much less in tax than defense workers in the primes of their careers.
Again, as you complained earlier, at least half the money ascribed to
pensions is spent on administration,
And soliders are notoriously poorly paid and so their salaries don't
generate much tax revenue.
Defense spending generates considerable tax revenue, these others--the
bulk of spending--do not.
Prove it. Your earlier complaint about the inefficiency of the social
services system makes it clear that you are aware how much of the
money is spent on paying emminently taxable incomes.
No it's not a point of view--either the money was spent on war or it
wasn't.
Using the exact method you proposed as fair, and with all
assumptions(*) in your favor, I've shown that not more than 1/4 of the
increase in U.S. debt since 1962 could possibly be attributed to
defense spending, much less 'war' spending.
Further, lumping in the prexisting debt of 1962 and treating all of it
as due to 'war', not even 1/3rd of the current U.S. debt is due to
past warfare.
Therefore, Warresisters' attributing 80% of all debt to past warfare
is WRONG. By your standard the correct figure is not more than 1/3rd,
and more accurately should be much less. Again, Q.E.D.
(*) Crazy, super-generous assumptions especially crafted for Bill
Sloman: all defense spending is for war, defense spending produces no
offsetting revenue, and the entire U.S. national debt in 1962 was due
to past warfare.
Thank you for making my (much) earlier point: We've been supplying the
defense of many other countries with our troops. Naturally that costs
more, and they'll spend less because of it.
Nonsense. You've spent money on garrisons outside your borders, but
most of your expenditure has been on baroque weapons systems, many of
which were eventually scrapped as impractical (Star Wars) or obsolete
before they could even be deployed.
And much of it was *peace* spending, well-spent. (**)
Oh, sure.
(**) (How many wars have been fought in Europe post-WWII?
It is a matter of definition. There was a small war in Greece just
after WW2, and another one in Hungary in 1956, and a rather large one
in former Yugoslavia some ten years ago.
How many
countries (Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslavakia,
Lithuania...) were subjugated by foreign powers in that time? And,
how many under U.S. protection were subjugated?)
You chose to protect the ones that the Russians hadn't actually
occupied ...
Again you contradict yourself, acknowledging that money we spent
defending cold-war Europe and beyond has added to our debt. By your
reckoning, more than anything else.
I don't. That wasn't particulary expensive, as your defence
expenditure go. The real extravagance was the expenditure on the
baroque weapons systems, designed to fight the last war.
By my reckoning, if we hadn't embarked on Johnson's 'war on poverty'
we'd have saved far more that just our entire national debt: we'd have
saved its horrendous human toll. Many who are now destitute,
illiterate tax-takers would be tax-payers, happier, and adding their
vitality and energy to the nation instead of weighing it down.
Ever read "Freakonomics"? It includes an interesting discussion of the
effect of the liberalisation of the abortion laws, and the consequent
effects - some twenty years later - on the U.S. crime rates.
The problem with the "war on poverty" was not that you spent too much,
but that you didn't spend enough. European social security looks
expensive to you, but one of the more interesting observations in "The
Bell Curve" is that the negro children fathered in Germany by America
negro servicemen have the same IQ as German-fathered kids of the same
generation, as measured in German schools.
The same servicemen came back to the USA and fathered balck American
kids whose IQ's were lower than their white contemporaries when they
got to school and fell progressively further behind as they went
through school.
Black bastards in Germany should be more socially disadvantaged that
legitimate black kids in the US. Would you like think about why they
did better?
All the social expenditures in your budgets are cheese-paringly mean,
That's irrational--the spending you describe as "cheese-paringly mean"
is twice the amount you've just called "disproportionately high," and
"[in]defensible."
Raising the actual amounts of money involved *is* irrational.
Historically, the dominant power spends as much on defence as the next
two countries down the pecking order - you spend as much as the sum of
the expenditures of the next ten in pecking order. That's extravagant.
What you need to invest in social services is enough to make sure that
your children can grow up to be useful members of society. You don't
spend anything like enough, so many of your childen who grow up in
poverty are too poorly nourished to take much advantage of what
education is available, and end up as unemployable prison-fodder.
Keeping them in prison is expensive, so it is a doubly false economy.
You may be spending a lot, but you aren't spending enough, which means
that the money you are spending isn't having the effect that it ought
to. That's wasteful.
No, if money was not spent on war and is deliberately portrayed as
'spending on war', that's called 'lying,' a criminal accounting
offense for a public or private enterprise's books.
We aren't accountants, but we do need to understand your society's
priorities. You've made them pretty clear.
Noam Chomsky paints much the same picture. His world-view is
essentially anarcho-syndicalist, and he sees the succession of U.S.
administrations as basically employer-conspiracies aimed at keeping
working class wages low in the U.S. and lower in countries where the
U.S. can influence the administration - such as the banana republics.
I can't believe that it is that simple, but it fits reality better
than pretty much anything else I've come across.
