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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (64801)	4/5/2018 5:07:05 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 362173

Military equipment was much simpler and cheaper and less training was required, for example. Military equipment has been declining as a percentage of your economy, and of our government spending ever since WWII.* Military spending even including the extra personnel costs is also down by all those measures and will continue to decline esp. as a percentage of government spending. Also I doubt you would argue that in order to have civilization we need a military as powerful as that in the US. Beyond the military as an economy becomes larger, this more surplus all the way around and more ability for non-government actors to do things that only government can do before. Yes complexity increases, but government doesn't have to involve itself in all of that complexity. Regulation could reasonably be reduced, and most of the cost of regulation is compliance costs, not costs to create, proclaim and enforce regulations. Both the military and government regulations could be smaller, but even if somehow doing so would really sound the death knell for civilization, both of them together are far from a majority of government expenses. Remember were not even talking about ideal levels of spending (and a quite reasonable case could be made that the ideal level is lower), but enough to "maintain civilization". Even if the ideal level of government spending (and thus taxation) in these and other areas were higher than today (which strikes me as a bit silly, but I'll go with it) it still quite clear that an adequate level to maintain civilization would be lower that $4tril a year from the US federal government, and trillions more from states and localities (not to mention all the trillions spent in other countries). *Despite its greater real cost per unit now than even in the relatively recent past, its also generally been declining as a percentage of military spending, with personnel costs taking up more of the budget (higher pay, higher retirement costs, and higher benefit costs,, medical care and medical insurance costs most of all). The higher unit costs have largely resulted in a lot fewer units being produced.