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Comment by usapatriot111 | Hacker News Reader

country doesn't need that many pilots if it doesn't wage endless wars, though.

Except they do. Pilots also fly in humanitarian aid, fly out civilians and medical casualties, carry out Search and Rescue, and perform reconnaissance during natural disasters.

Civilian pilots can, and do, all those things. And in much cheaper aircraft to fly/maintain.

I'm skeptical that when disasters strike that any private/civilian organization has the capacity to actually mount an effective relief operation. (Excess capacity is unprofitable and would be trimmed out before the disaster happened.) The military, on the other hand - by definition, in times of peace - has plenty of excess capacity to execute an effective relief operation.

Excess capacity and, for sure, logistics. Despite their other failings, there's still no one else with the experience and infrastructure necessary to carry out huge-scale international relief efforts quite like the US military.

That all applies to transport aircraft, not to combat aircraft. An F-35 is pretty useless for any of the roles you outlined.

Most of the boomer airline pilots will be retired in the next decade. The number of pilots in the US currently is about half of what it was in 1980. I'd imagine the demand for air travel has not decreased by half in that same time frame.

how else would we go into deeper debt? the budget deficit and debt is not going to grow on it's own.

Sure it will - that's the joy of compound interest :)

Entitlement programs dwarf military spending.

https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-Federal-US-budg...

They're called "entitlement" because people explicitly pay into them and then the government has to pay those benefits. That's not relevant if you're talking about the discretionary budget.

I'm kinda surprised that anyone still believes this, although politicians do say it all the time.

What actually happens is that people pay a tax. The tax goes towards covering people who are currently receiving payouts. The collected tax does not cover the payouts and has not for quite a while. In other words, you're not "paying in" to anything, other than that if you pay the tax for 3 years, you're eligible to receive benefits.

And the payouts are a really bad investment if you are a Gen Xer or younger. You're going to get a lot less out than you put in.

It was a really great deal for the WW2 gen, as they paid in hardly anything and got decades of payouts.

Sure, it's not the same dollars that I pay in that I'll be getting in the future. That doesn't change the fact that these these taxes have to go into the SS trust fund and is not part of the discretionary budget.

When people say things like "the government spends most of its money on entitlement programs" like it's a bad thing, they're completely misrepresenting the situation. If they weren't spending the tax that's explicitly supposed to fund social security on social security, that would be a bigger story because that would be fraud.

You can easily achieve this with tax cuts....

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