Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Standard Republican military Keynesianism. Too bad we are so against domestic Keynesianism. I'd rather have national high speed rail.

View on HN

To be fair, we could probably have both if national rail was a priority. The interstate system was built over decades during periods of high military spending and several conflicts.

Modernization of our nuclear capability isn't necessary a bad thing (if you assume MAD doctrine is effective and that the nuclear triad is a key piece of this).

Interstate spending can easily be viewed as defense spending. After all it's called the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways" and was partly inspired by Nazi Germany's Autobahn system that was instrumental for fast troop movement.

Indeed. I think you could make the argument that it was a better investment than something like the F-35 though - at least the interstate system provides continuous economic benefit etc.

How many nuclear weapons do you really need for MAD to be effective?

The magic number seems to be about 100. Enough to destroy important cities and military targets with some spares to reduce the chance of your arsenal being eliminated by a first strike.

This has been the standard political cycle since Nixon.

Democrats roll back military spending and funnel that money to their domestic pet projects like environmental causes, fighting poverty, and improving education. Then, once a Republican is back in office, they roll back most of those pet projects and funnel the money back into the military budget.

You can more easily see the ups and downs on some of the charts here: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/defense_spending

Wow, TIL the US spends almost a full percent of GDP on veterans. That sounded like a huge amount to me, but then I found the US has an equally huge number of veterans: 22 million, or 7% of the population are veterans! So it's just ~$8000 per person per year.

Think about that for a minute: if you put 30 random US people in a room, on average two of them will have served in wars!

Edit: you can also clearly see the rise of the military industrial complex in those graphs.

The state of the US military makes a lot more sense when you consider that it's the only jobs program that Republicans will enthusiastically support. A large part of its de facto mission is to be an (unusually wasteful) welfare program that can actually secure serious amounts of funding from Congress. That 7% of the population of veterans receives some serious benefits, including retirement if they served (IIRC) 20 years, plus they were employed for some period of time when they might otherwise not have been (or have displaced someone else from a job).

[EDIT] grammar

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/include/usgs_chart2p32.p...

so "defense" spending was higher during wars, not really surprising and its peak was during Obama's term. Really doesnt fit the whole republican vs democrat theory.

> I'd rather have national high speed rail.

I'd rather have national "high efficiency" healthcare. Think of how many medical schools, hospitals, and MD scholarships could be created with $112B. That's how you really "fix" healthcare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com