…and having a powerful Navy is what ensures it will stay that way.
I’d like to point out that Libya’s fleets were neutralized because of our powerful Navy, and the British saw serious naval action in the Falkland Islands. These are very recent events. We cannot presume that every threat will come from a land-locked country like Mali and Afghanistan, especially when some of the major threats today (Iran and North Korea) have significant naval forces.
If we cut our Navy to the bone, other nations will observe our weakness and increase development of their own. Same thing with any other area of combat. Only the major powers like China and Russia even bother trying to be competitive.
Blatantly false.
There have been a number of publicized incidents where drone airfcraft have been hacked by opponents, culminating in the acknowledged capture of a US drone by Iran. Manned fighter aircraft are going to be around for a long time.
Once again, people are recommending budget cuts without examining the underlying facts and the reality of the capabilities.
And yet NATO as an organization struggled to round up enough munitions and aircraft from contributing countries to operate in the Libya campaign. No single nation can conduct a campaign anymore. It requires a cooperative group effort, and NATO exists to coordinate those efforts. And once again, you claim there is no foe that justifies that outlay (Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russia apparently don’t count) but the point is to make sure it stays that way. Nobody wants wants to fight a war against an enemy that has parity in their forces, it would be stupid to do so and our enemies would take advantage of our weakness even more than they already do.
I don’t understand this argument. Doctors, teachers, and scientists do not maintain air superiority. Unless you know a teacher who can shoot down enemy aircraft, it’s apples and oranges.
By the same logic, how many garbage men can we train for the price of one doctor? The answer is that nobody gives a shit because even though he is essential to public health an welfare, a garbage man can’t do a doctor’s job and a doctor cannot do an F-22’s job. This makes no sense.
Why should I believe that? It’s merely something that defenders of the military state over and over again without giving any evidence for. The logical evidence is that ship-to-ship combat with guns and torpedos if over, just like combat with swords and shields. In the extremely unlikely event that the USA got engaged in naval warfare again, the fighting would take place with aircraft and missiles, and the ships would never get close enough to bombard each other. The idea that ship-to-ship combat would come back if we trimmed a few of the most useless ships in the Navy is ridiculous. It merely shows what sort of far-fetched thinking people have to use in order to justify our ludicrous levels of military spending.
I wish we could put an end to this type of argument. Okay, so 12.4% of my income is taken by the government and called a Social Security tax. And since the government has decided to call it a Social Security tax, that means that the Social Security program is healthy, “self-funding” and doesn’t contribute to the debt. Check.
What if a GOP Congress and President called this 12.4% tax the “National Defense Tax”? Could we then say that the military is fully self-funding and that any attempt to cut it is a fools errand and that we should look at the leech that is Social Security?
These are just numbers from a balance sheet. It doesn’t matter what you call the income source. Or, in your mind, does it matter what it is called? It seems that if we called this 12.4% tax the “Congressional Salary Tax” that you would have to argue that Congressmen create an absolutely vital economic input to the country since their salaries are offset by billions of dollars of tax revenue because of them.
I said it in the other thread, but I’ll say it again. I’m going to designate 90% of my income as “Liquor and Whores” income, so that when I am going bankrupt and family and friends suggest cutting out booze and women, I can use your logic and say how my boozing and carousing are fully self-supporting, but please help with my housing and utility budget which is running a deficit.
Money is fungible. The government is the government. It doesn’t matter if you call a tax something; it’s irrelevant, as it’s all going into the same place. jtgain’s hypothetical here is actually exactly the one I was about to type before I read his post; I even had a similar name picked out, the “Department of Defense Tax.” Changing the tax’s name would not magically make the DoD self-sufficient and Social Security a giant money leech.
Eh, if you have a program with a dedicated tax, and that tax covers the program, its self-funding. It doesn’t contribute to the deficit.
Sure, but good luck passing such a tax. SS can do so because its a popular program, and people are willing to pay for it. The same doesn’t appear to be true of current Defense spending. But generally speaking, I think it would be healthier to pay for more big-ticket items with explictly named taxes, as it would allow voters to have a better understanding about where their money and make it harder to run deficits.
The SS is legally mandated to be be used to support SS. So its not just a matter of the name.
If people gave you that money with the explicit instruction (and legal obligation) to spend it on Liquor and Whores, then you could in fact say your boozing and whoring are fully self-sufficent.
The government is the government, but in this case the tax payer isn’t the taxpayer. That is, the SS tax is paid by a different tax-base then the general income tax. It isn’t fungible, the money comes from two different souces, with different expectations on how it will be spent. The Payroll tax and the federal income tax aren’t interchangable.
There are no different sources or people willing/not-willing to pay. There is no need to “pass” a new tax. Just replace FICA with “LOA.” “Love of America” to provide for her defense. The masses who support Social Security simply have their pay stubs with the words “FICA” replaced by “LOA.” Better? No change for anyone; just page 1057 of a 4800 page bill renaming the tax. Could we say that the DoD was self-supporting then?
What different sources? They both come from Americans out of income. One is automatically taken before ever being seen; the other is transparent which creates a huge bias. If DoD taxes were taken secretly, but Social Security taxes had to be put on a 1040, we would see a huge backlash.
Do you think under such a scenario if a ballot question, for example, that would give every taxpayer making under $107k/yr a 12.7% tax cut would be passed if they would give up a meager stipend when they turn 67? I would believe that you would see large majorities for that.
The federal government, unlike me, can play these semantics and label their income sources. What if my employer was a whoremonger like me and went along with my labeling? Would I be justified in telling my family that my carousing budget was actually ADDING to my housing budget and that any suggestions to cut it would be ludicrous?
You can try, but it won’t pass. What did pass was a law creating FICA taxes for the express purpose of funding SS. Its not just the name, its the legal purpose of the tax, and the understanding of voters and Congress when the tax was created.
The taxbases for the two taxes are different. SS is a flat rate below a cap, general income taxes are progressive with a deductible. The two aren’t interchangable, if you raise one to lower the other, its to the advantage of one group of taxpayers at the expense of another.
SS has existed and been a popular program for 80 years. Its rather bizarre to say that there would be large majorities for abolishing it. Presumably if that were true, one party or the other would’ve swept into Congress to do just that.
If your employer said he was giving you money to pay for whores, and that he wouldn’t give you that money if you didn’t use it for whores, then it isn’t “just semantics” that forces you to use it to pay for whores and not to support other parts of your lifestyle. Of course, you can try and convince your boss to change the terms, but until you do, its silly to pretend that you can cut deficits in other areas by cutting back in whoring.
(also, I’ll pause here to insert my usual futile protest against using needless analogies. Is this conversation really being made any clearer by calling the taxpayers “your employer” and SS “a fund for whoremongering” instead of just discussing…what we’re actually discussing?)
You can try to run for office based on the idea of cutting SS to create a surplus from FICA taxes that can be used to pay for the deficit in the General Fund created by Defense spending, but you won’t win.
Clearly you have absolutely no clue about how this works, and are trying to basically restate the “tax the rich and hook up the poor” canard in terms of “Retire the old rich generals and hook up the junior enlisted guys.”
There are a grand total of 658 flag officers in total as specified by law, and only 25% of those can be over 2 stars.
There’s also a statutory cap on 4 star generals as well - we have a grand total of 39 right now, and that’s because of a temporary expansion in wartime that expires in the near future.
In addition, all generals and admirals are required to retire the month after their 64th birthday, and are term-limited as to how long they can be in their position. That’s why you see the guys in charge of CENTCOM or on the Joint Chiefs of staff retiring after being in that position- it’s not like they can go back to whatever they did before.
I seriously doubt it’s general officer bloat that’s costing the military very much; those positions are hardly sinecures, and they’re not comparable to CEO positions in terms of pay either- they make about 250k per year, and have some nice perks, but nothing like the CEO’s people love to hate.
I think you meant to say that military spending is a less efficient means of stimulus than paying people to dig ditches and paying others to fill them up. Of course military spending produces other value. A lot of our technology is driven by the military. This has been true since Colonel Colt’s armories ended up training generations or machinists and toolmakers and broke ground in manufacturing processes which fueled our economic development into the turn of the century. I don’t know how we can replicate that sort of development without either a near command economy (like the east asian countries like Japan, Korea and China have) or shoving about $100 billion per year into places like Los Alamos.
Does superior do we have to be? Aren’t you talking about force projection and not defense? Our ability to engage in military expeditions that are not necessary for our military defense?
There is a lot of discussion of the second amendment these days and I a fairly strong supporter of all of our amendments including the second amendment. Our founding fathers never envisioned us having a standing army. It imagined that we would be a nation of citizen soldiers who would answer when our country called us to service.
I understand that we are now a superpower so we might need some sort of standing army but we are paying for a military that can engage in a two front war at the drop of a hat. I am sure that the entire world benefits from the deterrent effect this has on world peace but I don’t see why we should single handedly pay for peace around the world.
Why do we need 10 Aircraft carrier fleets?
Do we really need such a large standing army? Wouldn’t we be able to maintain the same sort of deterrent ability with a larger national guard and reserve corps?
I think that is the problem. Some people have attached near religious significance to our military and after their shameful behaviour towards Vietnam veterans, the liberals can’t say shit about it.
Pre-1980 rates were probably counterproductive. The top marginal rate was 70%. Add state and local tax to that and things start to get steep. 50% is probably a much better top marginal rate both economically and tax policywise.
I don’t think you need to means test social security, just lift the cap. It makes social security solvent indefinitely.
How about we limit military spending to the rest of the government? 2/3 of our entire budget is non-discretionary, mostly transfer payments from one group of people (mostly taxpayers) to another group of people (entitlement beneficiaries, debt holders, etc.). The military represents about 2/3 of what is left, IOW, the military spends about twice what the rest of the government combined spends.
Yes but haven’t UAVs more or less taken over the role of many of our manned aircraft? Dollar for dollar how many drones would it take to do anything that a manned aircraft can do (outside of maybe dogfighting).
How far behind are automated destroyer groups and automated killer submarines?
Why do we need 10 aircraft carrier fleets? Why not more submarines?
And they never capture downed manned aircraft? We’re not going to ever get rid of manned aircraft but we are cutting the number in half by the end of the decade.
Aren’t you assuming that we want and are willing to pay for those capabilities? Why wouldn’t that money be better spent building roads and bridges. I mean we didn’t beat the soviets in the battlefield, we beat them in the marketplace.
What weakness are they taking advantage of now and how would they take even more advantage of it? I mean that really just sounds like a bumper sticker.
If there were a shortage of good garbagemen and so many good doctors we were doing surgery just for the heck of it, would it make more sense?
Mooney is fungible in the sense that you cannot determine the source once it is collected but the political capital necessary to collect that money in the first place is NOT. Go out there and try to pass a law that takes a flat 12% from everybody’s paycheck to pay for our military and you might not get as much support as you get for social security.
I think you are misusing the concept. It is not fungible until it is collected, a military tax would not get enough votes to ever get collected.
No its really not. When social security is collected it goes to the social security fund. When the fund gets the money it lends the money to the government and the government has an obligation to pay it back.
Good luck passing that department of defense tax.
You would have to repeal and replace the social security act. Good luck with that.
Social security benefits scale to some extent to the amount of social security tasxes you paid in. Are your social security benefits goig to scale with the amount of military tax you paid? You are talking about amending the social security act.
Is FICA supposed to be a secret?
You would be wrong. Social security is hugely popular and for the majority of American provides a very good return on investment. Your returns on investment depends on your lifetime average monthly income (LAMI) over 35 years. In retirement, social security pays you a benefit equal to 90% of the first $791 of your LAMI. It pays 32% of your LAMI above $791 and below $4768. It pays 15% of your LAMI above $4768.
At 67, your life expectancy for men is 15 years and for women it is 18 years.
To break even on the money paid on the first $791 of LAMI paid over 35 years (assuming todays rates (which are higher than in the past)), you would have to collect benefits for 5 years to recoup your investment, everything after that would be a return on your investment.
In order to break even on the taxes paid on LAMI over $791 and under $4768, you would have to live 14 years to recoup your investment.
In order to break even on taxes paid on LAMI over $4768, you would have to live 29 years to recoup your investment.
The expected rate of return on the first $791 of LAMI is very very high. The expected rate of return on the next $4000 or so of LAMI is at about the risk free rate (very low). The expected rate of return on LAMI in excess of $4768 is negative. THAT is why lifting the cap makes Social security solvent. Sure some folks will be getting $50,000 social security checks in the mail but they will have contributed much much more than they are likely to get back.
If you were getting paid to carouse and that money would evaporate if you stopped carousing, then you might be right.
I don’t think its class warfare, I think its probably just ignorance. Rich generals make almost as much in retirement as they make in service. They’re not doing it for the money anymore.
In terms of basic pay, I don’t think they even make that much. The pay scale might show $20K/year but there is a statutory cap on pay of about $15K/month.
With that said, there is a huge bottleneck at colonel. There are about 5000 colonels (and twice as many Lt Colonels) in the army for 250 generals. We probably don’t need 5000 colonels but they are forcibly retired after 30 years in the service unless they are promoted to general so its not like they can hang around forever.
Point the first: The US spends way too much on its military. The bloated military alienates the rest of the world, feeds the fever dreams of plutarchs like the Neocons, and has become the exact self-sustaining megalithic military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about.
For background, see the 2005 film Why We Fight:
Point the Second: Notwithstanding the first point, US military might since WW2 has kept continental and world-spanning conflicts at bay for six decades. This Pax Americana was bought with profligate US military spending.
Point the Third: That was then, and this is now. The US needs to understand that projecting force across the globe is neither practicable nor prudent. China and Russia are still suspect, but the rest of the globe can help us cope.
I see that asserted a lot, but don’t buy it. America spends plenty of time stirring up trouble and attacking other nations, while ignoring conflicts all over the world. It’s no peacekeeper.
There’s been no such wars in recent decades because it’s become clear that such wars & empire building are not profitable anymore; and profit has always been the most important force driving military expansionism. America could vanish from the face of the Earth and there’d be no particular increase in warfare in my opinion; there would likely be a decrease in war without America stirring the pot and arming puppet states right and left.
