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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (266506)	12/29/2005 9:42:06 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1573924

GDP has no relationship with the affordability of military spending It has an enormous relationship. The bigger the economy the less drain a certain amount of military spending is. maybe tax receipts, but even that is fuzzy. The larger the tax receipts are the more affordable the spending is to the government. The larger the GDP is the more affordable the spending is to the economy. The spending comes out of the economy whether it is paid for by taxes or with borrowed money. re: I wasn't at the time I made the statement but it is still true even when DoD civilian employees and deployed contractors and are considered. Much smaller than when? Then anytime between 1942 and the early part of Clinton's presidency, with the possible exception of the period of time after the post WWII demobilization but before Korea. Are you sure about the civilian employees? Yes. Counting DoD civilians and deployed in theater contractors combined with regular active military personnel. I'm not counting people working for defense contractors in the US, people who work for companies that build or support weapons and equipment or provide services that are not closely connected to the battlefield. I don't have the data, even as an approximation, to make a comparison. I think these numbers would also be lower as the military they are supporting is smaller and buys fewer weapons systems (more expensive systems but a lot less of them) then it did during the cold war or WWII). I agree with Ted (and others) that we don't need a military that is 4-5 times more expensive than the second largest in the rest of the world. I don't think that 4-5 times as expensive is relevant to the issue of what military level we need or should have. We aren't fighting other countries military spending. We don't send out a dollar to shoot down a yuan. We can face difficult opponents who spend a tiny fraction of what we spend. For example, the Iraqi insurgency obviously spends a lot less than we do, and even if we assume that this particular war is stupid, or wrong, or something we should end there is always the possibility of other wars which we should be prepared for. We spend more money so that while we are at war we can spend less lives. But if you think that we only need to defend against direct attack (and on top of that you have no interest in defending against the possibility of direct attack by long range missiles) than yes we could cut our military spending a lot. But if we are to change our strategic posture that decision should be made first we shouldn't just cut the spending under our current strategic posture (again even tossing out Iraq, and any policies Bush has implemented our posture under every president from FDR (at least post 12/7/41) to Clinton was not limited to passive defense of US territory. If you want to go back to a posture like what the US had in the 30s you could greatly cut our defense budget, but if so you should make that clear. The lead point should be something like "we are too involved militarily in the world, we should stay at home and let other countries worry about themselves", not "we spend too much". if we need to sacrifice a huge portion of our prosperity to impose our will on other countries. The whole point about $of GDP spent is that we are not sacrificing a huge portion of our prosperity. (BTW, you never answered the question about the military "entitlements" being included in your "defense" figures). My figures would include the regular military budget and supplementals for Iraq and Afghanistan, but not spending on things like Veterans benefits. But even if you add that it doesn't significantly shift the equation. Tim