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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

The US GDP is about $25 trillion. Our military costs about $1 trillion, even if you leave out things like the Veterans Administration or the funding of Ukraine's war. That's 4%, a number I'd be hard pressed to describe that as "minuscule". And it's close to the amount everybody else spends, combined.

The military is certainly necessary. But even a 25% cut would be a lot of money you could spend on other things, and still be by far the most advanced and expensive military in the world.

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Historically, it is minuscule. It wasn’t too long ago that waging a war for too long would bankrupt most countries, but the US has been waging wars for almost the entire time it’s existed, and it’s managed to build the worlds largest economy while doing it. But you’re suggesting we debate whether defence spending should be 3 percent rather than 4 of GDP. If all of our allies properly contributed to our defence, it could probably be 2 or less. I’m not a big supporter of government spending, but the effectiveness of our defence spending for its tiny relative cost is remarkable compared to literally any other period in history.

> the US has been waging wars for almost the entire time it’s existed, and it’s managed to build the worlds largest economy while doing it

Colonial imperialism is a highly effective means of resource extraction.

The US foreign territories have nothing to do with resource extraction. They're primarily maintained to provide strategic territory to the US armed forces.

Of course, chip manufacturing was moved almost entirely to Taiwan and South Korea out of complete happenstance, not because it was cheaper to make there for the American mega corps making huge profits out of the chips. And that's just one example.

Offshoring parts of your supply chain (and to high income countries no less) is your idea of colonial imperialism?

I'm not talking about territories, I'm talking about the US' long, well-documented history of neoliberal foreign interference with democratic nations, with the aim of establishing economic and ideological superiority.

I'm guessing it would be hardly noticeable to anybody. Just the federal deficit alone is 50% higher than total military spending.

Healthcare expenditure is 5 trillion, per-capita is around double that of other first world countries, for worse social health outcomes in many objective measures.

Welfare expenditure is 6 trillion, still >10% of the population is in poverty somehow. If you gave that money to everyone living in poverty, they would be getting $200k/year.

I think governments have a problem with wasteful (via incompetence, corruption, and bureaucratic overhead) spending. Sure, saving one % by cutting military expenditure or finding a few % more revenue by increasing taxes on wealthy or corporations might help at the margins. It's not going to be some incredible transformative thing like the online-leftist narrative would have you think.

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