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Comment by AniseAbyss | Hacker News Reader

The things you can do when you don't have to tackle child poverty or provide healthcare for all.

Its probably because of my Euro socialist identity but all I see is wasteful spending.

DARPA is basically just a way to hack the US' intensely militaristic nature to fund basic science & engineering advances. I'm happy some public money was spent researching robotic legged locomotion.

This is why I believe the US should withdraw from NATO, and many of our other foreign military engagements. We could service our population's worst off so much better if we cut our global footprint to the bare minimum required to secure our most core interests (napkin math, but at ~150 billion usd, overseas bases make up ~20% of the DoD's budget[0]).

Even reallocating those expenses by a quarter would be a tremendous boon to our social services infrastructure while still allowing us to invest in new technologies.

[0] https://www.mintpressnews.com/214492-2/214492/

Do you genuinely believe that whats holding back spending on social services in the US is the necessity of maintaining its military? That seems naive in the extreme.

It isn't at all, however Americans fixated upon some mythical conception of state fiscal responsibility will find the expansion of certain programs more politically palatable if accompanied with roughly commensurate cuts in other areas.

Reducing America's global footprint would also likely have the effect of producing a massive global political realignment, as nations in an increasingly multipolar world would need to adjust their security policies in order to face the potential challenges of existing without a global hegemony interested in fixing national borders and guaranteeing the secure flow of trade good worldwide.

This resulting uncertainty would, I believe increase the relative value of maintaining a presence large internally stable (relatively speaking) markets like the NAFTA, while reducing the viability of complex, brittle supply chains dependent on outsourcing the production of many individual components overseas.

With companies increasingly incentivised to produce where they sell their good, the power disparity between laborers and corporate entities would be reduced, as their labor force and their consumer base would be either the same, or intermingled. With workers better able to negotiate terms with their employers, rather than be forced to increase benefits for their workers, companies might find it more expedient to outsource the provision of a social safety net to federal and state governments through lobbying efforts.

None of this, of course fixes the general administrative incompetency of the American government. But it also sets the stage for a greater latitude of internal reforms by simplifying the machine that's in motion, as well as reducing its number of foreign dependents.

The Eurozone (NATO) is protected from Russia and other aggressors by US military spending, and trades along sea routes which are kept open by US military spending, to list only two ways in which the EU benefits massively from our tax dollars here in the US.

If the EU decided to allocate a proportional share to their common defense, maybe the US would have less reason to be intervening overseas and could spend some of our money here instead.

Too much global warming, and some of that trade might divert to sea routes kept open (modulo Alyaska[1]?) by russian military spending...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Passage

[1] might this geomilitaristic argument fly as a US pro-environment domestic argument?

The EU spends about 4 times that amount that Russia (the only direct military threat) spends. Russia has much smaller population and a much smaller economy and pretty much depends on selling oil and gas to the EU to survive.

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