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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Defense spending is largely a jobs program. The only question is, if you're going to have a trillion dollar jobs program if the rate of return on investment isn't higher in e.g. infrastructure spending than defense.

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If it's a jobs program then the money would be better spent in an FDR like manner - large infrastructure projects that support the economy, bridges, trains, internet etc.

That's questionable. Defense employs a lot of white collar workers in things like design and development of aircraft, weapons systems, satellites, SIGINT, etc. It's not clear that the same level of jobs would be there for an FDR-like program. Sure, the country's infrastructure would be better off and we would probably have more people employed per dollar, but I'm not sure the economy as a whole would be better off.

Presumably these white collar workers are valuable and employeeing them with confiscated money on a useless task is much worse for the economy than both the counterfactual in which the government does not bid for their labor and the one in which these resources are used to subsidize public goods such as basic science research and merit goods such as public infrastructure.

Again, I'm not convinced that's the case. You're implying that, for example, almost the entirety of the employees at Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop, General Dynamics, etc. and a good chunk of the employees at companies like Boeing would somehow be redistributed into the broader economy at a similar compensation level. That's upwards of a million white collar workers. You can't magic all those people into the broader economy without serious impacts, and replacing the expenditure on their salaries with expenditure on things like basic research and public infrastructure does not equate to the same economic outcome. I'm pretty sure doing so would further stratify the economy by replacing solid middle class jobs with a few tech and research jobs and a lot of blue collar jobs.

It’d help correct inflated housing prices. Think of all the paper pushers with security clearances making $100k+

You realize that trains, bridges and internet were largely advanced out of military consideration?

They say it’s a lot easier to convince the public to spend cash on defense then bridges, because “the bridge next to my house is fine”.

Also, bridge-building does not produce GPS and Internet as byproduct. We wouldn’t have the means to have this conversation if defense money was spent on infrastructure improvement, and most likely we wouldn’t have our jobs either.

It's also a geopolitical strategy. Even if that spending is rarely ever actualized in an armed conflict, the threat to do so still exists from the perspective of other countries. It's debatable how effective that is, but it's disingenuous to say it's just done for jobs or making contractors rich.

I agree some spending makes sense. The F-35 program does not give me a lot of encouragement we’re investing in good places.

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