The war is making you poor act
Hat tip to Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism for Rep. Alan Grayson’s “the war is making you poor act”.
Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.
Hat tip to Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism for Rep. Alan Grayson’s “the war is making you poor act”.
The US military spending is more in inflation adjusted dollars than in 1970 at the height of the cold war and the massive intervention in Southeast Asia.
The difference; there is far more capital involved and much of the labor is contracted out at huge profit rending expense.
Money spent on the US war machine takes resources away from productive use and drives up the costs of materials and technical labor.
Those aspect make it a political coin, good jobs at great pay for no benefit, tossed around and perpetuates the pillaging of the US economy.
Not only the wars but the war machines are making the US poor.
Empires die when the costs ruin them.
uh. not really … http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_qve2Ds-cMvk/SQfHyKlOaWI/AAAAAAAAAhw/GXZEXD_UDp8/s400/Defense+spending+as+a+percent+of+gdp+1949+-+2009.gif
defense spending is down from 80s.
The only thing down from the 80’s is the percent of GDP pillaged by the militarists.
If you look at the warfare state as a growth industry and measure its success as pillaging the GDP then yes warfare welfare is down since the 1980’s, as a fraction of GDP.
However, in the years since 1983 the Soviets who were occupying Poland, Czechoslavakia, HUngary and East Germany with 40,000 tank geared to smash through the Fulda Gap, those Russian guys evaportated.
So, what happened is the warfare welfare lost ground as a part of GDP. Not as good a plundering kind and the extra fraction of GDP went to the longest post war expansion in the US.
But GDP grew quite a lot in the past 30 years and the threats all disappeared.
The fact I relate is true the US spends more in constant dollars than in 1970, even though in 1970 it spent on the order of 7% of GDP that GDP was much smaller than today.
Your factoid ignores the fact that defense needs to should be to implement strategy and not get linked to GDP, unless you want to pillage social security for the warafre welfare state.
Defense strategy in a non militarist state is linked to threats and the threats since 1970 or 1983 have declined by a huge factor.
The only reason the US is spending as much today as it is, is the undue influence of the war profiteers.
Percent of GDP declines but the GDP growth is such as to hide the fact that spending has increased significantly.
Mike Kimel could have argued this much more quick than I.
This linked chart has been rebuffed before.
Go figure!!
The difference between the 1970 period and now is who gets taxed to pay for the war. In 1970 the draft put a tax on young men, requiring some period of service from them. Today we have decided that all should bear the burden. The contracting is required because unless you have a source of free labor (i.e. the draft and the very low wages attached to it) many of the tasks are to expensive to be done by military personel, for example cooking KP and laundry etc. So it has been decided that we will all bear the expense.
Sooner or later we will have to do like the British did in 1960 and decide that some part of the world is not our responsiblity. Being world police is a route to the poor house at least the 3 major example (rome, Britian and US) suggest it.
Make profits not draftees.
There is good money made exporting south Asians to overseas US military bases to do KP.
Yes, they outsourced the things that a buck private used to do so that Halliburton could make billions on the phony wars.
These wars should be paid by taxing the kids who otherwise would have been sent to Iraq.
Similar to buying their way out of conscription in the US War Between the Stats (1863).