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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (7240)	1/24/2012 11:26:26 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Respond to of 85487

How, if not by democracy? By letting people have power over themselves most of the time. And what about our society? What about it? How would we fight wars like WWII?; or face threats like China poses? Congress would still have the power to declare war, and to appropriate funds for the military. That's constitutionally clearly a power of congress. Exactly how much should be spent could be questioned, but I'm not arguing to get rid of the military. You could slash the size of government without touching the military (and I'm not saying "don't touch the military, its big enough that it reasonably could see cuts as well, even though entitlements are driving the fiscal problems, not military spending). In a WWII type situation, obviously spending would go up a lot. Right now the US government spend a bit more than WWII in real terms, a lot more in nominal dollar terms, but only a small fraction in %of GDP terms. Spending probably couldn't climb as fast as it did in WWII, military production is a bit more specialized today, you couldn't simply have Ford stop producing cars and swap over to tanks in a matter of months. But if we did have a protected conventional war against a major power (which seems very unlikely, but I don't think we should totally neglect the possibility) military spending would soar.