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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Once the security apparatuses and their methods are entrenched it's hard for them to go back.

Congress was spied on, a US presidential candidate that we know of was spied on... So imagine plain old American citizens... what can we expect?

If congress isn't willing to take back what they allowed, they aren't going to stop all by themselves. If congress tried, they'd get a lot of pushback. Just like the Armed forces would push back on a spending cut back even though the cold war ended over 30 years ago and our budget dwarfs any one else's.

But you see that same phenomenon in run of the mill operations like homelessness non-profits. Their heft and momentum keeps them going and if you wanted to dismantle them they'd put up a big fight and tell you that while homelessness has gotten worse without them it would be doubly worse even though they never made it better to begin with but their directors live well.

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US military spending dropped by about half when you look at GDP between 1982 and 1999, so your statements about the Cold War ending not affecting spending is just straight up incorrect. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/mili...

NATO are supposed to spend ~2% of GDP on their militaries. We're at least 2x that. That doesn't align with peacetime spending. We should be about half the spending we do now.

> ...~2% of GDP on their militaries. We're at least 2x that.

US defense spending was 3.4% of GDP in 2019. Quite possibly it jumped in 2020 as GDP dropped, but over 4% seems unlikely. (Still, in the ballpark and good context, I think your comment added to the discussion.)

I'm not saying the US doesn't spend a lot, just the way the op characterized the budget process is factually incorrect.

Why would I care about spending as percent of GDP? The absolute spending still went up. This is like saying your rent didn’t go up because now you are making more money so you can afford it more easily. This might be true, but it still went up. Moreover, after end of Cold War, it should have went down a lot not just in percentage terms, but also in absolute ones.

Absolute military spending is a ridiculous metric because inflation is a thing. Spending by percent of GDP is much more reasonable. For example, the US spent something like $75 billion in 1943, but no one would argue were putting 10xs as much effort in the military in 2019 when we spent ~750 billion. Looking at absolute values instead of either ones adjusted for inflation or by percent of GDP is cherrypicking to support your argument and is a bad thing.

There's a nuanced point here that looking at GDP % vs inflation adjusted yields different results depending on the range. For example, from 1982-1990, military spending was up, even after adjusting for inflation. It was actually 1990-2000 where military spending actually decreased, both before and after adjusting for inflation.

Compare that to GDP % which would indicate a steady decline in spending. So now we very much do have to examine GDP here in order to look at the argument specifics if we care about 1982-1990. With that said, the cold war ended around 1991, so the military stagnation is more or less in line with the cold war ending. The context missing on the original claim is simply that spending shot right back up once American mucked up and got itself stuck in the middle east, being involved in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

But hey, none of this relates to the original post at all really - that claim was not actually doing any lifting in the original argument other than to serve as a light illustration of how the military spending is never cut in a significant way, and that is generally true save a small exception from 2011-2015. The best that can happen is an effective slow cut through stagnation. And all of THAT is just to say that the government gets pushback when trying to walk back policies.

So did it ever really matter how the cold war affected spending here? What's the point of calling this super nuance out?

This is the only data point the poster had which supported their argument and it was factually incorrect, whether you look at inflation adjusted or as a percentage of GDP. Now, whether to use inflation adjusted or as a percentage of GDP is a valid argument, but doesn't change the fact the poster is wrong, and I don't think this is the forum where it really is going to get resolved.

> but doesn't change the fact the poster is wrong

Again, I think you're missing the point. The very specific, non relevant way you interpreted the claim is factually wrong.

To me, the claim read as:

> the military spending is never cut in a significant way

Which again, at an absolute level, is generally true when looking at inflation adjusted spending. Within context, absolute is relevant here though as this is about government process. The whole context makes this claim incredibly tangential to the whole point, which more or less boils down to "government has a lot of inertia".

> doesn't change the fact the poster is wrong

Again, did it ever really matter how the cold war affected spending here? What's the point of calling this super nuance out? My point is not to argue about 1990-2000 military spending and the measures of it.

I'm calling this out to say "arguing over small irrelevant details to an argument is not very productive if you care about the real topic at hand".

Are you trying to make this case because you believe that the government does not have a lot of inertia when it comes to these things? Great, then make that case instead of this rabbit hole. Or is this rabbit hole just about the non relevant fact itself?

Your missing why I'm making my comment. I'm not arguing for anything. I'm arguing against making any conclusions based on what the original poster said, because the only factual evidence they present is at the very least questionable. I'm not making a positive assertion that government inertia is not a problem, simply that the above post does not provide sufficient evidence that it is a problem.

The military budget listed there is lower than the military budget, as it does not count veteran's benefits as military budget. It does not count interest paid this year on military spending debt accumulated last year (or in any previous year) as military spending. It has to strictly limit the definition of what military spending is to get as low as the cited number.

Totally unrelated to the discussion. VA budget and the DoD budget are different line items and this is not what the OP was talking about, so does not matter in this context.

I think the assertion that homeless shelters never helped with homelessness merits a citation.

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