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[DKPOWPOW]

Wow. Spend more on military than everything else combined. And I bet half of the guys in the military (actually probably 90%) make less than the average citizen ($60k) a year.

So where's it all going? Shit we ain't gonna hear or see for another 20 years? How many arms corporations are gonna get filthy rich while our seniors are left to wander corridors and sit in wheelchairs.

Whats the point of protecting a nation when you can't even take care of your citizens?


With all that money you could completely revamp the school system. Kids could actually get a decent paying job right outta high school instead of putting themselves thru years of debt just to get a job that'll help them barely make it.

You could change the healthcare system completely so that Medicare actually pays for what it should. So that people could stay in they're homes and receive care without their families going bankrupt.

Why not invest in agriculture, so food prices go down, jobs increase, and people actually get healthier? Oh and actually have a huge surplus of food so the needy don't have to worry about a meal.

What about transportation? And the homeless? I live in San Diego, supossedly America's finest city. Yet for the most part (besides a very limited trolley system) unless u wanna take the bus you are out of luck in this town if you don't have a car. And downtown? Lol, there are literally blocks and blocks of homeless just pitching tents.

Yet here we are, throwing money we don't even have so we can blow shit up. God Bless America indeed, because I'm not sure who else would.

 

[Little Old Man]

Nobody listened to Eisenhower.

 

[Swass]

So you don't have the money for healthcare or a fully funded education system, yet you can pump even more money into your military? A military which already has a bigger budget than the next eight countries combined?

I'm sorry America but your country is a joke.

Don't forget infrastructure.. in a few more decades we'll be defending a turd.

 

[vordhosbn]

On the one hand spending money on military has given things like the internet, on the other hand there are way bigger priorities like health and climate change. Crazy.

 

[Conciliator]

Honestly? At this point the scale of government contractors and non-military staff is so huge it's one of the biggest employers in the country. Unemployment rates would probably jump as non essential personal were cut. The government contractor business is a racket with the ludicrous rates they charge. Under Obama they did try to fix the gaping hole of gross spending but people didn't want to follow the rules. Also likely plausible you'd see bases shut down which could be economic hits to their areas. The BRAC that happened in my area was a mess and ended up costing over 500 million just to move. I'm speaking on this based on personal experiences so I may be coming off biased in my view. Either way it's a big hole we dug ourselves into with it.

There's gotta be a better solution to that than to just shrug our shoulders and keep poring money into it indefinitely, while we lose wars being fought on new digital fronts.

 

[SpaceCadetKeon]

Guys, I'm starting to think banning trans people from the military wasn't really a cost-cutting measure.

 

[PnCIa]

Maintaining an empire is costly. Both parties know that.

 

[SatoAilDarko]

important thing is look at all those democrats that are against the bill, at least that's a positive

There were only 4 democrats who votes no. There were also 3 republicans.

 

[Mango Positive]

It amazes me how much money we pump into something designed to protect us from foreign boogeymen, while we totally ignore the things that actually kill us and our loved ones every day, like diseases that we don't detect early enough.

 

[Lime]

https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/909924140412538880

also, so much for "The Resistance"

https://t.co/Qyybq6wHFt

 

[Amalthea]

It amazes me how much money we pump into something designed to protect us from foreign boogeymen, while we totally ignore the things that actually kill us and our loved ones every day, like diseases that we don't detect early enough.

Propaganda working as intended.

 

[OG Shaka Zulu]

This is depressing as hell.

 

[daxy]

https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/909924140412538880

also, so much for "The Resistance"

https://t.co/Qyybq6wHFt

Of the people, by the people, for the people baby!

 

[Man with Knife]

Replace hospitals with guns!

Speaking of hospitals, I don't live that far from the Ramstein Air Base (biggest US military base outside of the USA) and they're building a new military hospital nearby for around one billion (!) dollars. I think this will make it the second most expensive hospital ever built.

Here is an article about it: Despite ‘America First' Rhetoric, Pentagon Ramps Up Presence in Europe

 

[Lime]

important thing is look at all those democrats that are against the bill, at least that's a positive

Elisabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, and so many other self-professed liberals voted Yes on this.

 

[SyNapSe]

Also likely plausible you'd see bases shut down which could be economic hits to their areas.

Mattis wants base closings/realignment but so far both the house and Senate bills have none. It's why the budget always goes up. Like those tanks the army said it didn't need but we kept making anyway. You close bases or stop building tanks and youre killing jobs or the local economy in some state so it rarely happens.

Wow. Spend more on military than everything else combined. And I bet half of the guys in the military (actually probably 90%) make less than the average citizen ($60k) a year.

That pie chart is just discretionary spending.

 

[Prodigal Son]

oh but dont talk about both sides yall

senators who voted for this can get fucked. our political class is trash.

 

[Gintamen]

It's almost as if they don't want to invest into the future of their own people and industry.

 

[MistakenMobius]

Elisabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Corey Booker, and so many other self-professed liberals voted Yes on this.

Well maybe they see it as a redistribution schemes that will employ American worker (after the crony capitalism took his share obviously)
It's like in 1984 with the building of the fortresses.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. B

 

[Keasar]

Most of that money is to fund his military parade isn't it?

 

[UnObtainium17]

It really don't matter how much more we spend on military... if the decision makers at top are a bunch of impulsive incompetent dumbasses it still won't make a difference.

Edit: I doubt it will amke us feel safer while here in the states.

 

[Gunblade47]

I used to dislike the comparison between the US and the Roman empire but there is a certain peace when you accept that it is an empire and that it's serving its own interests first and foremost.

 

[BrassDragon]

Have Angela Merkel and Moon Jae-in paid their bills yet?

 

[DKPOWPOW]

That pie chart is just discretionary spending.

Yeah, I just looked up mandatory spending. $2.2 Trillion was spent on social security, unemployment, and health/medicare.

So not bad at all, but our schools, agriculture, and transportation got screwed either way.

Not sure how I feel about it now, all that money we're spending on social security/medicare and the best most people get is $1000 a month and/or mediocre nursing home.

 

[MidgarBlowedUp]

I need to make some fake AI video and then sell my AI program to the military.

Million$ for goto commands.

 

[Shadybiz]

That's a lot of bullets and MREs.

Would rather it were a lot of bandages and MRI machines...

This freaking country...

 

[Taker666]

Worth pointing out that if all the Democrats had "resisted"..

..they would have had the numbers to vote it down (when combined with the Republicans who voted against it/abstained)

 

[TatteredHat]

Guys, you really don't need to do this.

 

[Dyle]

Welp guess we can say goodbye to the NEA/NEH/NPR

 

[JABEE]

Congress can be dysfunctional when it comes to a lot of issues, but the bipartisan consensus on America's wars never fail to unite these ideological foes.

 

[CyclopsRock]

I don't get the point of spending so much on the military when you really have no enemy and in a period of peace. All these ships and planes could be obsolete in the future if something more potent and advanced is created. What makes it shocking is that it's still around 4 percent of US GDP though.

It's the other way around, though. During a time of actual action the military gets less and less capable, because people (and expertise) leave, equipment is damaged, troops get put on multiple deployments and burn out etc. The peace time in between is when you're supposed to eat in to the deficit that's created during the war time. The problem the US has had is that it's been more or less permanently deployed for the best part of 15 years, so despite the fact it already gets loads of money, simply maintaining its existing strength takes a lot more investment. People look at the x new ships or planes and see a number going up, but obviously older ones get mothballed or taken offline altogether too.

None of this is an argument that the number's correct, but rather the idea that it's peace time so you should be spending less doesn't wash.

 

[freeofgreed]

Can't wait for American "liberals" to tell me on the internetz that the EU is embarrassing because it isn't welcoming refugees and because of its racism toward muslims FeelsGoodMan

Since it seems like you're fishing for a response I'll bite. Wth are you even talking about? What does anything you wrote have to do with this thread?

 

[RoadHazard]

Holy fucking shit, that's a lot of money. Imagine how good the healthcare could be in America if war wasn't priority #1, or how many cool things NASA could do if they got a share of that, etc, etc.

 

[SolarPowered]

700 billion USD

Who is even left to challenge us? Cut the budget down to 500 billion and pump five billion into our cyber defense instead. Guess we just gotta make more tanks, heavy weapons and light weaponry to sell to the police instead because the army can't even use what they've got fast enough.

Holy fucking shit, that's a lot of money. Imagine how good the healthcare could be in America if war wasn't priority #1, or how many cool things NASA could do if they got a share of that, etc, etc.

Just a few handful of billion could probably transform our cyber departments in desperately needed ways if used right. Russia don't give a shit how many tanks we make when their cheap army of 400 pound Macedonian hackers weaves entire realities around blind Republicans.

 

[OTIX]

The chart in the OP is just discretionary spending, the US actually spends an enormous amount of money on healthcare compared to other countries. Here's an older chart.

And here's a similar chart for Sweden, not entirely comparable but close enough.

Social security: 42%
Healthcare: 14%
Administration: 14%
Education: 13%
Infrastructure: 8%
Justice/Law enforcement: 3%
Defense: 2%
Other: 4%

Defense and Education almost seem to have traded places.

 

[God Dayumm]

Lots of Democrats also voted for this.

#NotAllSides

 

[Violater]

And to think, we are not at war with NK yet.

 

[G.ZZZ]

Since it seems like you're fishing for a response I'll bite. Wth are you even talking about? What does anything you wrote have to do with this thread?

'Cause the biggest issue with the middle east and the whole "us against them" mentality was specifically breeded out by the US.

That americans then have the galls to talk about how EU is dealing with the issue after they genocide brown people for the last 40 years is disgusting.

 

[RoadHazard]

The chart in the OP is just discretionary spending, the US actually spends an enormous amount of money on healthcare compared to other countries. Here's an older chart.



And here's a similar chart for Sweden, not entirely comparable but close enough.


Social security: 42%
Healthcare: 14%
Administration: 14%
Education: 13%
Infrastructure: 8%
Justice/Law enforcement: 3%
Defense: 2%
Other: 4%

Defense and Education almost seem to have traded places.

And yet public healthcare in America is shit, and getting sick can utterly ruin a person. What the hell is going on there? The American healthcare system must be unimaginably inefficient.

 

[ChryZ]

Universal health care, impossible. Money for the war machine, no problem.

 

[Morat]

Meanwhile, people are homeless and the sick are left untreated.

 

[Ponn]

How much of that is going to VA benefits, mental health and PTSD programs like K9's for Warriors?

 

[Easy_D]

And yet public healthcare in America is shit, and getting sick can utterly ruin a person. What the hell is going on there? The American healthcare system must be unimaginably inefficient.

I think the Social Security bit is what pays for your healthcare. We have a ceiling on how much you get to pay for healthcare per year comparable to a maximum of 100-ish dollars per year for checkups and whatnot. Either way, taxes pay for your hospital visits to a larger degree. If tiny Sweden with 10 mil inhabitants can do it, you can too, don't believe the lies about it costing too much, I bet it can be done on state level.


14% for healthcare is just how big of a budget hospitals themselves get, I think.

 

[Charles Brandon]

And here we are in Germany fighting over that 2% NATO thing.

That pie chart doesn't represent GDP though.

Would be interested to learn:

What is this as a percentage of GDP?
How does it compare to other nations (France, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, Russia, China) in terms of GDP %.

 

[ArkhamFantasy]

Thats more than twice the military budget of China, North Korea, and Russia combined IIRC.

 

[Bad_Boy]

They are gonna have to legalize weed nation wide at this rate.

Whos paying for all this shit.

 

[Easy_D]

They are gonna have to legalize weed nation wide at this rate.

Whos paying for all this shit.

The American people are, with their lives. Literally. Because fuck ill people, fuck poor people, fuck people with mental illnesses, gotta have the biggest guns.

 

[Hexa]

That chart is discretionary spending only, not not discretionary spending. Total spending:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...art-federal-spending-circulating-internet-mi/

Also, it doesn't take into account state/local budgets, where most infrastructure and education spending occurs. For example, the federal government spent $100 bil on infrastructure last year, but state/local spent about $300 bil, which isn't accounted for in this chart.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52463

So overall, the chart is quite misleading.

 

[freeofgreed]

'Cause the biggest issue with the middle east and the whole "us against them" mentality was specifically breeded out by the US.

That americans then have the galls to talk about how EU is dealing with the issue after they genocide brown people for the last 40 years is disgusting.

You say this as if the people on this site who criticize the EU are also in favor of the war in terror. Also Europe isn't innocent from participating on that war either.

 

[RulkezX]

They are gonna have to legalize weed nation wide at this rate.

Whos paying for all this shit.

Well if Mexico is paying for the wall, I'm sure Donny can make all those Brown people in far of lands pay for the privilege of being killed by the greatest nation on Earth.