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Comment by ews | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the core of it, we have moved most of our resources to foreign wars and let our infrastructure to rot. That this is not even part of the public discourse shows the decay of the US as a country.

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It is very much a part of public discourse, the military industrial complex has been discussed since the 70s. The problem is that - well, I don't know what the problem is. Maybe it is that everyone is too busy with the meaningless stuff that they show on cable news to be too concerned with things that affect their lives.

The problem is far too many americans take pride in how big and tough our military is. They equate military spending to might.

You propose "Hey, maybe 700 billion dollars on the military is excessive" and you get "But then china/russia/the terrorists/etc can invade us!"

2.1m service members, over 700k civilians employed by the military directly [0]. Then you have the endless stream of military contractors, and you're looking at almost 1 out of every 50 working age people in America benefits directly from the federal military activity.

So yeah, of course people are taking pride in a big military since it provides so much of their community income.

0: https://www.governing.com/archive/military-civilian-active-d...

That budget could still go to supporting their communities if we employed them doing more meaningful work rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, etc.

For some perspective, often this money and manpower DOES go into improving local infrastructure. New Orleans levies were substantially more resilient in the last few weeks as a result of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Often? The Army Corps of Engineers had a budget of less than $8B in 2021. The Army Corps of Engineers has three main missions, one of which is the civil side of things. I'm not sure how it breaks down budget-wise though.

But saying money spent on the military often flows into local infrastructure seems laughable.

Just because the military establishment is capable to pool together some skills/resources to polish its public image doesn't mean another non-militaristic public service (in whatever definition of the term) couldn't achieve same or better results.

It’s more than that. Culturally they US has a big population that is anti-large government social benefits, except in the concept of the military.

By joining the military you gain access to federally paid education, health care, social services, housing etc. that has broad political support. If you yanked those funds you’d decimate one of the foundational social safety nets in the States.

Nothing would be decimated if we yanked those funds other than our ability to destroy other nations. We could build a much better social safety system that covers far more people. It’s not as if military spending is the only option as far as this goes.

My point was that the military is a social safety net with broad political approval. Other options are much less popular.

I now understand and agree with your point.

> the military industrial complex has been discussed since the 70s

For...broad definitions of “the 70s”

---quote---

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

---end quote---

- Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States, Farewell Address, Jan. 17, 1961

Rail is "socialist" (not meant in a political way) in that it is generally a government investment for the people. My sense is the US is generally less apt to do this vs e.g. europe where there has been much more investment. I think this has more to do with it than the money not being available because of wars.

We could have done both. Opponents of rail decry it’s apparent inefficiency and call it wasteful spending. Even assuming it is wasteful spending it’d still have been much better spending $6 trillion on building trains than on the wars. Has so many resources ever been spent for so little gain?

We happily have planes and buses, which are usually superior to passenger trains. Removing the TSA would create more total value in infrastructure than adding more trains, even though some trains are worth it.

Is it much different than the Hoover Dam, or interstate highway system? We praise those accomplishments...

The interstate highway system is actually an interesting example, because US did have a bunch of private rail and trams, before the govt built the highways, subsidized suburbs and made it all much less relevant. Apparently building the cities around driving is now considered to have been the wrong choice. It's good that we know exactly what the right choice is /this/ time around, so we just need tons of taxpayer money to shove it thru ;) (for the record, I do not support either war or transit spending).

> My sense is the US is generally less apt to do this vs e.g. europe where there has been much more investment.

The US government has a lot of investment in infrastructure, however these investments almost always go to private contractors who produce bad results raking in a lot of money (comparatively to any sort of however-inefficient public service). Unfortunately European governments have been following this way for a few decades now and privatizing everything.

Of course, only profit is privatized. The private sector still largely benefits from considerable sums of public money, and States take action quickly to save endangered businesses (eg. banks). Or, to paraphrase some thinkers, "Socialism for the rich, exploitation for the masses."

> the money not being available because of wars

There's two assumptions that irk me in this sentence:

1) Capability has nothing to do with money. The entire value of money is based on public confidence in the monetary system. Whether you have those virtual (or paper) numbers of not, a community or State has considerable infrastructure, skills and resources it can leverage to help improve life for all. There's usually legal provisions to enable "requisition" of private resources/infrastructure in times of needs, but there's also nothing stopping a government from developing a volunteering-based economy without money (like a huge cooperative).

2) The money is pretty much there, and it's spent not just on the military. There's a lot of infrastructure money that's being misspent on contractors doing a poor job and not doing any form of maintenance. There's a lot of bureaucracy money spent on managers making life miserable for field workers and making sure they can't do their job properly: education, health, regulation enforcement... As an outsider to the USA, i found a lot of Last Week Tonight episodes enlightening in this regard. You could also take Medicare for example, which is designed as a scheme to siphon money into private healthcare (insurances and cliniques), where it appears funding a public socialized healthcare infrastructure (as in many other countries) is far less costly overall.

I've found this humorous rap clip from the 2016 elections to summarize the situation pretty well overall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Qv6S_GtLo (to watch with your favorite invidious instance).

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