11-22-2016, 02:03 PM
(11-22-2016, 01:08 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote:(11-22-2016, 12:11 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(11-22-2016, 11:50 AM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: In return for our taxes? We sure don't get the level of government service they get in Europe.
What we do get is a monster military. It's also not just the fighting forces, either, we have the logistic support to use our force most anywhere in the world. That's expensive. That just seems to be our priority, that we put fighting strength ahead of our People.
Precisely. The US military monolith accounts for over half of discretionary government spending. Forget "entitlement" programs, such as Social Security. The military-intelligence-surveillance complex, that is the real Third Rail in American politics. Politicians (including Trump, Hillary and, sadly, even Sanders) dare not touch that rail in their policy proposals. Only with sequestration was military spending curtailed at all. But just you watch. When Trumponomics blows another hole in our federal budget, the deficit hawks will put social programs on the chopping block once again. It's the same old story.
Yes indeed. There was some movement toward cutbacks at the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, "the peace dividend." But 9-11 knocked that down, and energized the "surveillance state" as never before too. Sanders I believe has talked about cutbacks, but not too loudly or too much, because of the current wars on terrorism.
The Depression and New Deal gave us more social services spending than before, but right after that it was World War II that not only brought us out of the Depression, giving some people the impression that defense spending normally helps the economy, but made us the "leader of the free world" and gave us the "military-industrial complex." Since then, although the Great Society in 1965-66 gave us Medicare and more social spending, Reaganomics since 1981 has accelerated the decline in social spending while exploding the debt, deliberately adding to the excuse for more cutbacks. Meanwhile cutbacks in military spending have been few and far between compared to the increases. Americans somehow get a vicarious macho satisfaction in being #1 in military power and able to impose our will on the world. And the MIC has been an amazing corporate gravy train. Trump has appealed to this macho satisfaction and will try to deliver on it, while keeping women down in society in the bargain, and making sure that their main role in life remains making babies for the guys.