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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

America has a lot of taxation. Fortunately for the Scandinavian countries it spends it on "protecting Scandinavian shipping lanes" and "medical research grants that benefit Scandinavia", rather than solely on local welfare spending. The America First lot are learning a lot from Scandinavia there, though. I'm not sure we're all going to like where that could lead.

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I can't immediately think of a major US naval deployment in the North Sea outside the big NATO exercises every 1-2 years. Were you thinking of a specific shipping lane?

Scandinavia (like most countries; it's not specific to them) benefits from a relatively piracy-free world, and a constrained Russia. This takes a giant amount of money to achieve, and it's mostly funded by the US taxpayer.

US keeps the 6th fleet in Europe / Mediterranean sea. It costs a pretty penny to defend Europe's seas - about 40 ships,175 aircraft and 21 thousands people.

https://www.c6f.navy.mil/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Sixth_Fleet

It is very difficult to compare or extrapolate US with Scandinavian countries. US is socially super-heterogeneus, huge, and big population while Scandinavian countries are socially homogeneus, small size and population. And this is just the beginning.

I though America spends its taxation on destabilizing Middle East and flooding Europe and Scandinavia with migrants.

If Europe tried to do what America does for Europe it should dump military equipment onto various central and South American countries so they can fight among themselves and create droves of refugees traveling North.

The US has been destabilizing South and Central American Nations quite well on its own.

This is a common misunderstanding. The US doesn’t send its military around the world because they want to protect freedom and democracy. The US does this to protect open markets that it then gets first right to exploit.

The US has benefited from this situation since WW2. It’s one reason why the US economy has been so successful.

It’s also only now that the US has exploited these markets that they can question the purpose to continue their military imperialism.

TLDR: the US military across the globe wasn’t done out of altruism. It was to expand US economic power.

Arguing intentions seems foolish. The result is the world gets free trade defended basically at zero cost, which was my point. If Scandinavia had to pay for that, it would have far less money available to spend its money on Scandinavia First policies.

>the world gets free trade defended basically at zero cost

At zero cost? Ask the families of those who have been killed by american millitary.

>If Scandinavia had to pay for that

Other than the Scandinavian soldiers killed, and millitary gear lost in the different wars? Other than the thousanda of refugees scandinavia and europe have taken in from the destabilized middle East?

>it would have far less money available to spend its money on Scandinavia First policies.

There are no Scandinavian first policies.

Again, why should Scandinavian countries pay for Americas geopolitical activities more than is already done?

You're being too general, in my opinion. Piracy is almost completed stopped just by presence, not by combat. American also engages in and their taxpayers fund foreign wars, which perhaps it should stop doing, but that is very separate to economically bouying up a global economy via and global R&D via global grant awards and open sharing of American research findings. Trump is right now pausing NIH funding and detaching from the WHO. All the funding that paid for benefited other countries is now gone, partly because people globally laughed at America for not spending enough on its citizens, and eventually enough of its citizens didn't think it was worth keeping on doing that any more.

This is just wrong, on many levels. If you look where tax revenues go, it's mostly defense (military industrial complex) and middle-class entitlements.

That's just wrong. Defense spending is 13% of the budget: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727

Federal taxes are mostly spent on welfare like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, & SSI.

You just said that "the budget is mostly Y" in response to, "the budget is mostly X + Y"

Huh?

adamc said "budget is mostly A + B" and the response was "no, its mostly W + X + Y + Z"

The things he cites are mostly middle-class entitlements. That's where a lot of social security and medicare spending goes.

After… age 65. Right? Depending on when you draw SS.

So the middle class is now the 50+ age group?

This explains everything.

That isn't welfare. Most of those are middle-class entitlements. And defense is the second highest category: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Calling Social Security "welfare" is some weird political stance.

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