To: tekboy who wrote (50843 ) 10/10/2002 12:34:59 PM From: JohnM Read Replies (2) | Respond to I don't buy your first point, since we're not in fact "devoting so much money to military matters" on a relative basis--defense spending as a share of GNP has dropped significantly since the end of the Cold War, and even recent increases won't bring it up near where it was. As Paul Kennedy has noted, what is astonishing about contemporary American geopolitical dominance is that it's being done NOT through massive extraction and deployment of domestic power reserves for military purposes. We've just grown so much (in absolute and relative terms) that even a less-than-dramatic defense spending rate is enough to make us tower over everybody else. In short, we could afford the domestic stuff you want to purchase if there was political will to provide it, which there isn't.
