Military spending and poverty -- I only just realized...

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

…that redirecting one would eliminate the other, basically.

I’d been wondering if one couldn’t do anything useful with all the money that’s squandered for military purposes, so today, I quickly did the numbers:

– an estimate of global military expenditures totals around 1100 billion dollars (at least in 2004)
– there are about 1.4 billion people living below the international poverty line of 1.25 dollars/day (in 2005, apparently)
– if one thus divided military expenditures evenly among those people, everybody would get about $2.15/day, and thus be elevated above the poverty line.

I don’t know, this may not be news to anybody, but seeing the bare figures like that was somewhat shocking to me. Of course, things in the real world aren’t nearly as simple as just handing out money to solve everybody’s problems, but the brute fact that these resources exist, in principle – well, I don’t know what it means exactly, but there’s sure as hell something wrong with the way things are.

In the end, if we didn’t spend that much on war, we probably wouldn’t have cause to fight that many wars.

2

Well good point as long as we cut only unneeded things, I too do not understand AT ALL why we are still in Afghanistan? I know we went in to look for Ben Laudin and support that we did that, but as soon as we knew he is not there why did we stay?

Why are we paying to build buildings and stuff for people who want to kill us? Why did we let them set up a corrupt government and then give it money of ours in a recession? Why did no one run on a platform of saving money now by leaving, there is nothing to win there and it is of no value to the world or us.

Note that I do understand why we must have some troops in Iraq, as we want no oil supply disruptions and that is OK, but just guard the oil fields and ports, stay out of cities and few soldiers would die. Quit helping people who only want to kill us. Put a tax on their oil exports and make them pay back the costs of getting rid of Saddam for them too.

Yes I could fix the budget real fast. Why have no politicians ran on such a platform, it would make sense to 95 percent of people I think. The Taliban, if we were really in a war we would have lots of POW camps but I never hear of any prisoners but the ones we got at start of war. Also, do they have any of our soldiers? If there are no new POW’s we are not in a war, we are just giving our money away to those who hate us, why?

3

^ You guys have a very over-simplistic outlook on how the world actually works, and have not done much to inform yourselves on some very basic newsworthy facts before posting this … stuff.

I better bow out before I get myself in trouble.

4

So what are you going to do about those millions of newly unemployed soldiers? Do you know what happens when people with guns lose their jobs? Hint: see Iraq.

But why do people say “If only we cut the military” as if the military weren’t vitally important to survival? Why not say “If only we transfered all the money from fire stations to poverty”?

5

Put the unemployed soldiers in school on the GI bill, and that cost plus any that do need welfare would still be far less than we spend per soldier today, so that is what. Also every penny spent then would be in our country and for our own people instead of giving money to people who want to kill us. They also would not be being shot at.

6

So even more government money can go to colleges, subsidizing excessive tuition rates? So even more people can graduate with bachelor’s degrees in a soft job market and wind up night manager at a Wendy’s?

7

Is the OP old enough to remember why we went in to Afghanistan in the first place?

8

This wasn’t meant as a political debate; and thanks, I fully appreciate that the real world is not quite as simple, and I said so in the OP. This isn’t a proposal to actually transfer the money spent on the military to the poor of the world, there are countless of reasons why that wouldn’t do shit, and in many cases, probably fuck things up even more. Neither is a zero-military world – much less any individual zero-military country – actually viable given the state of affairs, nor does giving everybody below the poverty line $2.15 a day actually eliminate poverty.

But still, these figures say something: that an ideal world, in which there’s no war, no hunger, and all your hippy dreams come true, isn’t intrinsically impossible – the resources are there, probably enough to provide for the needs of everybody currently alive. There’s just no way from here to there, and moreover – and that’s the depressing part – that we should end up here, instead of there, makes just so goddamn much sense.

9

That’s where we disagree.

10

Basically, this is just the (entirely mundane and pointless) realisation that, damn, we spend more money on an industry largely centred around killing each other on a large scale and figuring out new ways to do so than we’d probably need to instead feed each other, and provide for basic human needs.

It’s perfectly obvious why things worked out that way, but that doesn’t do anything to attenuate the shock that it actually did.

11

Here’s a test to see if you really believe that all of the money spend for military purposes is “squandered” (which I realize is not what you said in the portion of the OP that I quoted above, but is implied later on in the OP where you propose diverting all military spending to other purposes):

From now on, leave your front door unlocked and post a sign on the front door stating that it is unlocked and you trust everybody not to break in. (The sign on the door is to make this situation more compatible with disbanding your military, which is kind of hard to do without everyone knowing about it).

After all, nobody spends money on the military for defensive purposes.

12

The OP seems to suffer from a common left-wing misconception that money is the same thing as wealth and it just sort of materialized out of thin air. And by simply redistributing it, we can make everything right with the world.

Perhaps a better question the OP should be asking is why some people make $1.00 a day while other people make millions. And “it’s not fair” is not the correct answer. Not everyone contributes equally to the economy, nor does everyone have the opportunity to do so.

13

How about this? I remember the day we started the campaign in Afghanistan. The moment it started, there were a lot of happy folks down in a hell hole that used to be called the World Trade Center; I can still smell the reason we’re there.

As for blotting out military expenditures, si vis pacem parabellum, and be ready to use it. The US has been targeted because it’s the “big dog,” and must be willing to respond in kind.

I’m going to stop before ranting too much, but this kind of sentiment (shared by many I consider friends for a long time) pisses me the hell off.

If you don’t like how the world works, move to Switzerland. Bear in mind that they have mandatory conscription because they also realize that being able to fight is a necessity.

ETA: Sorry for the angry tone. Just one of my hot button topics.

14

Well, why?

Basically, I’m just thinking about resources – it seems that there is, broadly speaking, enough for everybody. Enough, at least, to cover basic human needs – food, clean water, shelter, sanitation, basic health care, and perhaps even some education thrown in. So at least on that front, a world in which everybody has these needs provided for does not seem impossible.

Of course, as I said, there’s no way to get there, and not even any way we could have gotten there – we’re human, after all – or, well, that’s a bit unfair to humans, any species evolved in a similar way would likely display the same characteristics that make such egalitarianism impossible for us – territoriality, a tendency towards authoritarian hierarchies, an inability to recognize people on the other side of the globe as equal to you and your closest friends, and that damn tendency to always seek out a pedestal to somehow elevate oneself over others – in the end, genes just don’t care much about fairness, they only care about being passed on, and even that only because they have been passed on.

So even if some magic invisible hand suddenly distributed everything evenly, such that, in principle, nobody would suffer from want, such a state would not last, and it’s only natural that it wouldn’t; wealth would coalesce in some places and become sparse in others, as sure as entropy always increases.

But still, knowing that doesn’t mean that I don’t think it’s sad.

15

OK, I realize that by now, probably everybody is going to respond to the way my words have been misread in this thread, rather than to what my intended meaning was, but on the off-chance that I can still turn things around somewhat – take this quote (which, for those not up on their latin and not wishing to look it up, roughly means ‘if you wish for peace, prepare for war’):

I don’t dispute that this is true; rather, I lament that it is.

Yes, we can’t do away with the military. No, giving the money to the poor won’t magically solve all problems. I’m not proposing such. But still, I think it’s sad it has to be this way.

Or, take my door, which I have been advised to leave open in order to recognize the necessity of military spending: I know I can’t, because most likely, somebody will take advantage of that. I’m aware of that. I’m also aware of why it virtually has to be this way. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it – in fact, I consider it almost unbelievably sad.

So, for everybody who wishes to chide me for not recognizing that we need to protect us from bad people, or anything like that: this need is exactly the point.

The figures in the OP provide an illustration: were this need absent, we’d have it made; if we had it made, perhaps this need were absent! But one can’t come about without the other already being in place: we’re locked out of this circle.

16

Well I’ll let someone else answer that.

Thats why.

17

I agree with the OP, and although it was expressed in simple terms, I think the heart of what it’s expressing is very true. We are squandering resources on unnecessary wars instead of focusing on reducing poverty in our own country.

Yes there could be a larger debate on eliminating the military completely, etc. but I don’t think that’s what he was saying.

18

You can also say that we’re squandering our money on unnecessary sugary beverages, or unnecessary television productions, or unnecessary plastic crap from Walmart, the list goes on and on.

19

Governments in the US, at the various levels, spend enormously more on things like poverty programs and education than they do on the military or police.

But they aren’t, and show no signs of becoming such.

Or perhaps even more cogently -

Regards,
Shodan

20

Methinks the OP failed Econ 101. As though eradicating poverty is as simple as giving people food. Methinks he also knows nothing of cholera or clean water or basic sanitation.