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

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Whether we can make the world perfect or not, we sure as hell could make it a lot better than we’re doing. Whatever the appropriate ratios are, the amount we’re spending on “Defense” is way too much and the level we’re spending on foreign aid is far too little.

Sure. But I think unnecessary military spending is especially pernicious, because it’s devoted to killing people instead of just mindlessly entertaining them.

There’s a third option: We could keep our current promises to the soldiers that have already enlisted, but slow down enlistment in the future as we gradually scale back military spending.

I concede that in this imperfect world we require a military. However, the amount that we are spending over and above what is actually neccesary is just bloated government spending. We spend more than the rest of the world combined on Defense. And whatever is spent over and above what’s actually neccesary could be diverted to humanitarian causes and relieve a great deal of suffering, even if we can’t eliminate poverty completely it would make a huge dent.

22

One needn’t consider the whole world to pursue this idea.

The U.S. presently spends a ballpark of $100 billion per year to pursue its War in Afghanistan. This is about six times the country’s entire GDP ! This country had 35% unemployment as of 2008. Even a fraction of the U.S. military spending would go a long ways towards improving Afghan well-being and morale. Many Afghan men have joined the Taliban simply as the only visible way out of poverty with no other jobs available.

Obviously we shouldn’t just drop banknotes across the countryside out of airplanes. But with Washington willing to spend such large sums, it is a real shame that we haven’t befriended Afghans more. As the most trivial example, on projects to build Afghan infrastructure, should we not have emphasized Afghan labor? No, no; it was just too sweet an opportunity to bring foreign firms to slurp from the troughs of easy money.

23

So, you do agree that, in principle, such a world would be possible – it’s just not actualizable, due to, well, what essentially boils down to circumstance and the human condition? Isn’t that fucking sad, though?

[/QUOTE]

That’s precisely it.

24

no, I don’t.

That means, to me, it is not possible.

I don’t see it as “sad”, I just see it as human.

I regret what we do at times, but except it for what it is, and do my own personal best to mitigate it.

25

So, what we’re saying is give peace a chance?

All you need is love?

Imagine.

26

Wow. That’s a lot of factual error rolled up in two sentences.

27

Yes, but money does not equal resources. Money is just a tool for redistributing existing resources. When you, or the U.S. Government, spends money on something, it’s not as though the money magically disappears and the guns or food or whatever the money was spent on magically appears. Things just change hands.

28

I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask where those figures come from, as they don’t agree with anything I see.

This Wall Street Journal (dated Sept 8, 2010) gives the current cost of the war in Afghanistan as $5.7 Billion a month, or $68.4 Billion annually. I guess that’s a ballpark of $100 Billion a year - in the same sense that I’m in the ballpark of nine feet tall.

This release of the BEA (the folks who measure this stuff) says that GDP in the US was $13.2 Trillion dollars (third quarter 2010, annual rates). That’s Trillion, with a T.

And this BLS release (the folks who measure unemployment in the US) says that the unemployment rate in the US, while definitely not good, is 9.8 percent, not 35 percent.

29

I’m seeing a lot of Fallacy of the Excluded Middle. We spend a hell of a lot more on military than is necessary just to ensure our peace and defend our borders. There’s a lot of room between “reducing the military” and “eliminating the military.”

30

Hippie.

31

I thought septimus was referring to the GDP and unemployment rate for Afghanistan, not the US. This site puts the GDP at about $27 billion and the unemployment rate at 35% for Afghanistan.

32

Ahh, in that case I retract my post, as I was making the other assumption.

33

Well I used to have a job, that I would love to still have - though a couple of my jobs went to outsourcing and my last job went to the economic collapse.

On the whole, I would prefer that outsourcing customer service jobs stop, outsourcing manufacture stop and the financial industry people who got us into this whole mess all go to a ram me in the ass jail for a few years. And yes, that includes many people who went on the newspapers, blogs, tv shows, radio shows and had jobs recommending the mortgage bullshit, and the stock market manipulation bullshit and the finance industry lack of oversight.

34

There seem to be some very harsh responses to the OP. That he doesn’t understand economics, or the necessity of maintaining armies, or that he is too “young” (code for naive?) to remember the start of the Afghan campaign.

But, he never actually stated that money IS wealth. He only seems to assume that it is a convenient proxy for it. In many circumstances that is entirely appropriate.

He never stated that all military spending is wasteful. He only expressed a bit of sadness that it IS necessary.

Even stranger than the general attitude attacking the things he didn’t say are some of the things said to demonstrate their error. Taxing Iraq to pay for getting rid of Saddaam? :dubious: Who do you think was propping him up? Mostly to neutralize Iran. Which, collapsed into theocratic fascism as a reaction to the West’s designated puppet. Would the Taliban make Afghanistan very unpleasant for many people if the US wasn’t there? Sure. But, that didn’t worry the US when it basically created the Taliban to fight another enemy.

In my opinion, the OP seems to be lamenting the fact that if the resources of the world were used efficiently to benefit as many people as possible as much as possible, there may be no poverty. We wouldn’t all be living like kings, but real, starving to death, no clean drinking water, kids dying of easily and inexpensively treatable illnesses, type of poverty may not exist.

Bombs and bullets are far more expensive than bread. But, the wealthiest nations spend on them to protect what they have, or take even more. Even within countries, those tapped into the industrial-military complex leverage their power at the expense of others. Occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. may not much improve the lives of the average Afghan or Iraqi, but they make a lot of money for the construction, oil and mercenary companies involved. More to the point, they make a lot of money for the politicos who actually call the shots. This money doesn’t come from thin air, though. U.S. taxpayers have to foot the bill. Even those who can barely pay their bills.

So, the world at large benefits little from the vast majority of military spending. Poor nations could really benefit from the stability it provides, but can barely take care of the essentials, so can’t afford to obtain it. Within the large nations that “benefit” from it, only those connected to it really benefit while the taxed populace has to pay for the funneling of wealth to the connected.

Military spending wouldn’t be necessary for any country, if no other country indulged in it. This would make the world a better place by itself, even if you didn’t spend the saved money on relieving poverty for the world’s poorest. But, this is where I think the pile-on is uncalled for. The OP doesn’t propose a way to do it or even say that it is possible to do it. So calling him naive or ignorant is misunderstanding his point.

If I might paraphrase (unless I’M misunderstanding the OP): “The world would be so much better if we spent less on killing each other and more on helping each other.”

35

We surely wouldn’t be able to defend ourselves or allies if someone wanted to fight us.

In Notes on Nationalism, Orwell writes (having defined “nationalist” in a certain way):

36

Ike said , when talking about the Military/Industrial complex "the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced powder exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.’
Well it is too late . it happened. We spend more on war than the next 26 nations combined and yet many Americans are afraid if we might cut back ,we will be imperiled. By who? We have been fought to a standstill be countries with no navy, no airplanes and no technology to speak of. We fight on their turf and they are protecting their homes. People get pretty determined when that happens. Yet we keep going to war, one after another.
If it comes down to guns or butter, it will be guns. The people will go without .

37

Well, thank you for that! :smiley:

I noticed the ambiguity after I posted, realized that “Afghanistan” would have been slightly clearer than “the country”. I think I was still within the 5-minute edit window, but thought “Nah, no Doper would be so dopey(!) as to confuse the two countries here, given the stated facts!” I was wrong about that, and apologize.

I used “about” and “ballpark” because one can get different figures from different sources. Some sources give a much lower GDP figure than the $27 billion mentioned by Walkabout, including his cite if one accidentally (as I did) takes the official exchange rate GDP.

And none of this ("Duh, is US GDP only a few billion :confused: ") digression addresses the point I was making in my post.

38

Thanks for your post, GreenHell – you got the gist of what I was trying to express, and put it much more eloquently than I did. Basically, my intention wasn’t really debate at all – which is why I started the thread here, rather than in GD or even IMHO. It’s just that the simple realization of the brute fact I presented in the OP hit me with a certain force, and I essentially just wanted to pass this on without much analysis.

It wasn’t a well thought through and carefully argued post, I admit, but such wasn’t my intention – I simply wanted to share, the same way one might share a movie, a painting, or a piece of music that one was momentarily blown away by, through simple presentation, rather than by posting a full-blown exegesis of the piece of art in question. The latter is obviously a viable option, as well, and essential if one wants to at least have a chance at talking about something from a common ground, but in the end, what would the discussion really have accomplished? In all likelihood, we’d all be mired by now in a ceaseless back and forth about minutiae and details, all more or less essential or relevant, and after pages of back and forth, we’d probably come to the conclusion that in the end, it’s complicated.

And of course, that’s true – if it were easy, we wouldn’t have the problem in the first place. And I know that it’s true, and even a bit about why it’s true, perhaps. It really is complicated, but in the end – we spend more on the machinery for warfare than it would take to eradicate poverty (at least as measured by the international poverty threshold). That brute fact remains, and all the discussion, the details and caveats, all the good reasons for why things are the way they are – and depressingly, they are often very good reasons indeed! – don’t change anything about that, and may sometimes even serve to obscure it somewhat: it’s a well known quirk of human psychology that we have a tendency to mire ourselves in the details, the little, perhaps more manageable problems in order to not have to worry about the big picture too much. That’s again a necessary trait if we want to accomplish, well, anything at all; if we didn’t possess it, we’d probably all be crushed by the realization of our cosmic insignificance.

So I am not quite saying:

Rather, I am saying that I would like to live in a world in which I could say this – in which I could honestly believe that the world could, with tremendous effort, actually be such a place. That there are good reasons for the world to be the way it is – it’s a fact that we can’t just take the money spent on the military and use it to eradicate poverty instead. But it’s a sad fact.

But in the end, all that I really would like to be saying is – give peace a chance.

39

Here’s my favorite quote on this matter:

I’ve seen several estimates that a single life can be saved by giving as little as $200 to a good charity. We could easily save millions of lives if we just diverted a small fraction of our military expenditures to other things.

40

GreenHell, you are a very reasonable and seemingly sane poster. How come you only have 56 posts in the whole 6 months since you signed up?

You got a real job, or something? :wink: