increase military spending?

[Athena]

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Pentagon_military/Incr_Milit_Spend_table.html

 

This link gives arguments for increasing military spending, and arguments against increasing military spending. What are your arguments?

 

Also, I read Obama wants to cut military spending and then that the recent increase is his increase in military spending. Does anyone know how this flip would happen? How does Obama come to agree on domestic budgets he opposed and agree to increasing military spending?

[Marat]

The real security issues which affect or threaten almost everyone deeply and personally are lack of welfare support in times of unemployment or personal emergencies; lack of access to affordable healthcare; lack of state-provided daycare so women can realize their legal liberation as a practical matter by being able to go outside the home and work; lack of access to affordable university education for themselves or their children; inability to enjoy decent housing because of excessively high rents, astronomically high real estate prices, and the lack of public housing to provide an alternative to these problems, etc. In contrast, while the U.S. addresses these real threats to personal security much less adequately than other developed countries do, it massively overspends on protecting its citizens against the largely imaginary threat to their personal security from foreign military opponents, of which there actually are none.

 

Of course there are terrorist threats, but these are in fact quite small if measured in terms of American lives lost relative to other threats. Thus for example the number of people killed in the 9/11 attacks was approximately equal to the number of Americans who die every six weeks, every year, in the past and continuing on through the foreseeable future, from diabetes. Yet while the United States government spends very little preventing or curing diabetes, it invests massively in defense, which when positivistically measured is actually a very much smaller threat than any military danger. Add to this the fact that military expenditures are highly inefficient in addressing the terrorist problem, and having a massive fleet of aircraft carriers trying to oppose a single terrorist walking into a crowded football stadium with a home-made bomb is like trying to keep mosquitos away with a howitzer, and you see how irrelevant the overinflated military budget is to the terrorist problem.

 

Conventional military threats to the U.S. seem similarly unreal, since the geopolitical conjuncture is such that there really are no major nations now or in the foreseeable future with a practical interest in attacking the U.S., unless Greenland suddenly starts to lust after Martha's Vinyard. The only other use for America's conventional military forces is imperialistic invasions of distant countries whose actions are really not a threat to any American lives or substantial American interests, such as Iraq seizing Kuwait (minor price inflation in oil?) or Libya not being very democratic and treating its rebellious citizens badly (zero cost to any real American interest). Having a large conventional military force actually amounts to a disadvantage for America, purchased at a huge cost, since our military prowess just tempts us to intervene in pointless wars which cost us massive amounts of money and loss of geopolitical influence, such as the trillion-dollar invasion of Iraq on the basis of a 'mistake' about WMD, or the hugely expensive incursion into Afghanistan, which will now apparently end with the U.S. withdrawing so the Taliban can return, so all we shall have accomplished with about a decade of war and hundreds of billions of dollars is essentially the same as we could have achieved by bombing al-Quaida training camps there right after 9/11.

[mississippichem]

I have only one argument:

 

We should cut everything. Our deficit is out of hand. In order to keep our AAA bond rating, we should cut everything from the military to medicare and medcaid and raise taxes on everyone. Leave no stone unturned. Our current level of debt/spending is entirely irresponsible and unsustainable.

 

Our military is already vastly superior to any other fighting force in the world. I believe we can afford to give it a rest for a decade. No one will catch up to us anytime soon. All the world's armies that are even comparable to ours are our allies anyway...Britain, Israel, France etc.

Edited April 23, 2011 by mississippichem

[Marat]

Our debt is not out of hand, but rather, our national government spending is too low for a modern, humane, developed, industrial society. The total proportion of the GDP taken by government in the U.S. is only 28%, in contrast to France, where it is 46%. Germany, where it is 40%, and the United Kingdom, where it is 39%. When you subtract the further 2% of GDP from the U.S. government tax intake which represents useless bloating of the defense budget beyond the defense expenditures rational required, you see that the U.S. is trying to get by with spending 26% of GDP on its real needs, which is a fraction of what other nations spend. Of course this is going to produce a huge deficit, not because spending is too high, but because taxes are unrealistically low for what a modern government does.