The General Political Thread

[DaMonkey]

Lol it doesn't matter democrat or republican or trump, military spending will always increase because freedom!

It's the nature of all government entities, rather a regime democratic or despotic, to ever increase its power and spending. It's especially easy to do this when the mass electorate are devout practitioners of the "make our children pay for it after we've gone" doctrine.

[Riddlez]

If freedom is the goal, there are much better ways to spend that money.

Economically I'm not saying it's great, but it provides jobs and more work for thousands of engineers, among other roles.  $800 billion or whatever total for the military is huge, but the amount of jobs and work that money provides is also enormous. 

It has been established that militairy spending is probably the shittiest investment a state can do in terms of economy. It does create jobs, but not even close as much as other (government) departments would, like medical, education or infrastructure. (Source: my academy reading material: Peace and Conflict Stues, chapter 1)

[Theodin]

Medical is complicated and I won't deny that, but U.S education investment provides useless jobs, without any empirical improvement, and infrastructure jobs are mostly temporary

[Duuring]

Medical is complicated and I won't deny that, but U.S education investment provides useless jobs, without any empirical improvement, and infrastructure jobs are mostly temporary

What.

[Toffee]

education is useless. You heard it here first.

[Karth]

Infrastructure policy making here is always mostly at a state level. Like if the government issued the state of Vermont $5B to build new roads/bridges, maybe the governor of that state is conservative and won't spend a dime for 5-10 years, it just depends.  This is federal spending, and they spend trillions as it is on healthcare programs.  They already did a study, every $1b spent on military equates to around 11,000 jobs, so this $80B increase will provide hundreds of thousands of jobs in a skilled sector which relies on military contracts.

Education again, the impact of spending would have to be constituted at a local/state level.  It's already a failure, when there are public schools which rely on a large part of federal money, which can be defined by average test scores and teacher compensation, it's a huge mess as it is

There's a good example of a Chicago district where teachers were 'faking' or just giving students A's so they could retain some federal money

[Toffee]

Maybe that's why America should reform it's fucked up systems. It's funny how everyone else manages to provide universal healthcare but it's too expensive for the self proclaimed greatest country on Earth.

[Theodin]

It's abundantly clear that education investments doesn't give results in the US.

Maybe that's why America should reform it's fucked up systems. It's funny how everyone else manages to provide universal healthcare but it's too expensive for the self proclaimed greatest country on Earth.

Ah, I'd like to hear how you'd reform the US healthcare industry into a socialized system.

[Toffee]

It's abundantly clear that education investments doesn't give results in the US.

Maybe that's why America should reform it's fucked up systems. It's funny how everyone else manages to provide universal healthcare but it's too expensive for the self proclaimed greatest country on Earth.

Ah, I'd like to hear how you'd reform the US healthcare industry into a socialized system.

I don't claim to have an answer but you can't deny it isn't broken when you spend much more per capita than any other country. If you want things to be cheaper then fix them instead of just blindly following the same path which everybody can clearly doesn't work.

[Karth]

I agree for sure education needs to be heavily reformed.  Healthcare... look at it this way, it costs $3 trillion in spending to keep up current Medicare and Medicaid programs.  Universal healthcare, at least from when economists used sanders campaign, would cost $2.8trillion a year.  To put that into perspective, in 2016 the CBO said the fed government took it $3.3 trillion in revenue.  That's just revenue, not talking about the obvious debt pool we are in, universal healthcare would likely put us in a massive recession for several years, with a small likelihood of getting better without a plan for the government to make money. 

[StevenChilton]

They already did a study, every $1b spent on military equates to around 11,000 jobs, so this $80B increase will provide hundreds of thousands of jobs in a skilled sector which relies on military contracts.

Rubbish. That money comes from taxation or borrowing (and the latter gets paid back by taxation anyway). You're taking money out of people's pockets in order to pay for ships and missiles. If you didn't take it out their pockets they'd spend it themselves in ways that would create just as many jobs if not more (since it's inefficient to tax and spend given you need to pay the bureaucrats to administrate it). 

If the aim is to create jobs then increasing government spending makes no sense unless you're in a recession, and even then you always borrow the money rather than increase taxes. 

[Toffee]

In the UK people pay national insurance. It gives the government funds to allow them to pay for the NHS. I'm not sure if a similar system would work in the US but it would be better to put the 80 or so billion to reform to create a better society for your citizens rather than increasing funding in a department that it isn't essential to.

[Karth]

They already did a study, every $1b spent on military equates to around 11,000 jobs, so this $80B increase will provide hundreds of thousands of jobs in a skilled sector which relies on military contracts.

Rubbish. That money comes from taxation or borrowing (and the latter gets paid back by taxation anyway). You're taking money out of people's pockets in order to pay for ships and missiles. If you didn't take it out their pockets they'd spend it themselves in ways that would create just as many jobs if not more (since it's inefficient to tax and spend given you need to pay the bureaucrats to administrate it). 

If the aim is to create jobs then increasing government spending makes no sense unless you're in a recession, and even then you always borrow the money rather than increase taxes. 

http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/economy/employment
That's my source, analyze it yourself, I just had it saved from a paper I had to do last year

[StevenChilton]

They already did a study, every $1b spent on military equates to around 11,000 jobs, so this $80B increase will provide hundreds of thousands of jobs in a skilled sector which relies on military contracts.

Rubbish. That money comes from taxation or borrowing (and the latter gets paid back by taxation anyway). You're taking money out of people's pockets in order to pay for ships and missiles. If you didn't take it out their pockets they'd spend it themselves in ways that would create just as many jobs if not more (since it's inefficient to tax and spend given you need to pay the bureaucrats to administrate it). 

If the aim is to create jobs then increasing government spending makes no sense unless you're in a recession, and even then you always borrow the money rather than increase taxes. 

http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/economic/economy/employment
That's my source, analyze it yourself, I just had it saved from a paper I had to do last year

It literally shows tax cuts create more jobs than military spending...

[Toffee]

As well as education , healthcare and clean energy.