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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

This makes me sad. I get that rounding errors are a thing. However, a million here, a billion there, pretty soon, we're talking about real money.

In the real world, most people can't really comprehend the value of $1,000,000.00. One million might as well be one billion might as well be one trillion. At the risk of being cliche, if we did not have the loss of the $4 million per year (of just this one specific thing), what else could that money have been used for instead?

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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

I wonder if he really meant that though, he basically defined the terms of the cold war and the subsequent decades spanning arms race.

Not that someone can't regret having to do something they don't see an alternative to, I just wonder how sincere he was.

Happy to see this discussed on HN.

Please, please read this to get a better understanding for yourself: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp

As a student of WW2, there's no indication that Ike was not serious about what he said in that quote.

In fact, he was offered and declined a presidential ticket immed. after WW2 to command NATO in Korea. So he wasn't politically-motivated.

One thing you could possibly fault Ike for is that when he criticized the military-industrial complex (MIC), he pulled his punches: he wanted to add Congress (a la MICC) but realized that doing so would make them feel defensive and reduce his support.

The reason Ike talked about the wastefulness of war was that the entire industrial outputs of the USA, Europe and Japan for almost a decade were wasted.

> However, a million here, a billion there, pretty soon, we're talking about real money.

While that may be true, the million won't have contributed to the problem in that case. :p

> At the risk of being cliche, if we did not have the loss of the $4 million per year (of just this one specific thing), what else could that money have been used for instead?

We could have raised the annual salary of active duty personnel by almost three (3) dollars a year each.

I wonder how many "3 million dollar drops in the ocean there were".I bet if we totaled them all up service men could have gotten a very nice pay raise.

1.3 million active duty military members apparently. So kind of a “dollar menu + tax” kinda raise

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