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

To: Road Walker who wrote (328726)	3/13/2007 7:27:01 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575981

The data I presented precisely addressed the original point, unlike yours which was at best a 3rd order effect The original point was the increase or decrease in the size of the military industrial complex relative to the economy and population of the US. The focus was mostly on the economy (although the fact that fewer people are employed in the military and in making weapons, and of course our population has grown) The money for the military industrial complex comes from sales to the US military and foreign weapons sales. I've demonstrated that the vast majority of this combination comes from sales to the US military. Where considering change over time, not absolute numbers. The biggest possible increase for overseas weapons sales was if they where zero during the cold war. If I researched the actual figures they would certainly be bigger than zero, and your argument would be even weaker, but to save myself a lot of time I did you the favor of plugging in the best possible figure your side of the argument. Assuming growth of overseas weapons sales from $0 per year in the cold war, to the low teens of billions today, that growth is to small for it to make up for the fact that the US military took up an increasingly small part of the economy. Its basic math. $13 billion dollars is something like a tenth of a percent of our GDP. So even if we used to sell zero dollars of weapons the increase in foreign weapons sales couldn't come close to balancing off the decrease in military spending as a percentage of GDP. Its not a small or even moderate difference. Its a massive, obvious, night and day difference. Its so overwhelming that the precise data wasn't needed to see it. Your argument here is like saying that I can't say the day is brighter than the night because I don't have specific details about exactly how bright each is but you insisted so I got the data. If your going to argue that the data for foreign weapons sales before 2004 is relevant, then tell me how could you can increase the growth of foreign weapon sales by starting with the real larger number rather than the zero figure I generously assumed. You can't. Growth from any positive number X, to another positive number Y, is less than growth from zero to Y.