I realize that we avoided another last-minute government shut-down scandal as it looks like FEMA is going to have all the funding it needs. If you missed the story, here is an article. Here’s the nub:
I’m putting this in the pit because this appears to be the stupidest cut imaginable. It isn’t even ‘spending’- it’s loans if I’m not mistaken. If the Dems are correct, cutting this program costs 10k jobs. I thought jobs were real real important to the Republicans, but hey fuck the country’s recovery if there’s a chance to kill a ‘liberal’ program, right?
I’m not putting this in the ‘Stupid Repbublican Idea of the Day’ thread because I want to compare this cut suggestion to an alternative: Ramstein Air Force Basein Germany. How much does THAT cost us every year? To defend us against WHAT?
Ahem. I’ve asked some military people what purpose military bases in Germany serve more than 6 decades after the Nazis were defeated, and so far I have not heard a straight answer. “To keep us safe” is the closest I’ve heard. When pressed I get evasions like, “I’m sure somebody could give you a Powerpoint presentation on the topic if you asked the right guy”, but never so much as one.single.example. of what threat is being held at bay by our continued presence in Germany. If it turns out Ramstein is especially important from a strategic perspective, we’ve got something like 700 other bases flung all over the world. Take your pick- can we really not let any of those go? Isn’t a future-oriented (and by comparison, cheap) goal like fuel-efficient vehicles more important than defending against the bugbears of the past?
What if we framed it this way: In what units are safey measured? How many of these units do we get from our bases in Germany? What’s the per-unit cost? Since budget constraints are putting disaster victims’ very lives at risk here at home, are pointless, budget-crushing bases really worth the cost?
Now compare to what we get from developing more efficient/alternative fuel vehicles. Does anyone doubt that refusing to develop alternative energy, whether for transportation or other uses, is a great way to drive the world economy off a cliff and cause a huge increase in human suffering down the line? Why would this be at the top of the Republicans’ list of things to cut, unless they really are basically evil?
I just can’t get too worked up about not giving more money to the auto companies we just gave a shit load of money to. Especially if it is giving them money to help meet federal fuel economy standards they are legally obligated to meet.
I don’t get why we have so many bases on foreign soil either. However it was once explained to me that Ramstein is critical, or at least very convenient, for airlifting critically wounded out of Iraq and Afghanistan to better equipped treatment facilities.
We could airlift all the non-injured soldiers out of Iraq and Afghanistan, then shutter Ramstein. Or one of the other 699 bases if the math says it is more convenient.
As for giving them money, well, we might as well admit that this auto business is more than just business. IMHO it would be unwise to wait until the free market makes these decisions, as those would be too-late, reactionary decisions.
And there is the matter of utility. If we are spending X dollars overall, and a huge chunk of it appears to be wasteful military spending, we could cut one thing, increase another, get better future results and still see a net spending decrease.
It’s a subsidy to the loans - i.e. the program pays the difference between what the car companies pay and what the loans actually cost. In simple terms, if the lender wants $12 back tomorrow if he lends you $10 today, this program says you only pay $11 and the government will pay the difference.
At a cost of $1,500,000,000 for 10,000 jobs, the government would be spending $150,000 per job.
It isn’t like military people are to ‘liberals’ what gays, black people, Mexicans, poor people, the unemployed, foreigners, scientists, logicians, atheists, Muslims, environmentalists and other ‘liberals’ are to conservatives. I certainly don’t have a problem with the military overall, and I don’t think most Americans do either. But maybe that’s not what you’re implying.
Yeah, it’s nice that Ramstein is so good for the local economy. One justification I’ve heard is ‘the locals want us there!’ I meant to point out in the OP that if the Germans wanted to command our troops that badly, they should’ve won the war :mad:
Ok, thanks for the clarification. Complaining about ‘giving’ the auto companies money is at least valid, but see below
Looking at it again through the lens of relative utility, what do we get for every $1.5 billion spent on Ramstein? Smiling German faces? That’s nice. But overall it appears to be a backward-looking black hole for tax money, money that (I’m arguing) would be better spent preparing America for the future.
Sure, it is $150k per job, but when the project is done we literally have the supply chain infrastructure in place for the next generation of vehicles. I predict we will be Very glad to have it someday. Stopping the project in-progress will just piss off a lot of people, and is a moronic move to make for a party that is always arguing for the value of ‘certainty’ in the markets.
You don’t get it. They don’t want to command the troops. They don’t give a shit about the troops. All other things being equal, I’m sure they’d love nothing more than for the troops to fuck right off. The reason they want you here is that American soldiers are paid American dollars by the American government, and spend those American dollars on German burgers, German cigarettes, German rents, German taxes on booze and German hookers. The troops represent a net source of income for the locals (and a net influx of currency for Germany as a whole).
Of course, the American-centric answer to that would be “Yeah, and ? Why should we care about the economy of Ramstein, Germany ?”. Which you of course shouldn’t, and is what makes this particular argument in favour of keeping this (or any other) foreign military base around wholly specious. Since when is the Air Force a fucking philanthropy ?
As for keeping it around because it creates jobs for Americans, don’t you have windows to break back home ?
This. If all the soldiers were to disappear but the US government kept pumping cash into the German economy you’d have some very happy Germans. “We’d like it if you all kept buying our beer and paying our hookers and renting our houses and giving us jobs in your offices, but just without needing to put up with all the fucking soldiers and airmen.”
(Also they should for the Cinnabon at Ramstein to relocate to where I’m at, because the Air Force gets fucking everything nice; they can do without a goddamn Cinnabon for once.)
So what? Breaking it down this way is non-sensical. The government isn’t paying $150,000 per job to get 10,000 jobs, it’s paying $1.5 billion to assist auto manufacturers; the jobs are a secondary benefit. If the original purpose is worthwhile, then the “per job cost” is immaterial.
Pointing out that killing the program would destroy those jobs is just enumerating the consequences, not the sole justification for continuing it.
If that’s all it is, I’d say it’s been a “fucking philanthropy” since it started. Meh, it’s better than after Versailles.
But I wasn’t concerned about any debauchery. Fuck it! No, more that people in the US will start getting cholera or what have you if we don’t dig them out from underneath these disasters- that is, don’t fund FEMA. Lousy outcome. We shouldn’t have to render the auto industry obsolete as an alternative. How about we fly less planes and materiel around the world, use the money for better things? Sorry if it makes things harder for the Germans, but OTOH it sounds like maybe they could do with a few less legionaires.
As has been pointed out, the locals don’t necessarily want the soldiers, they want the cash flow. This was shown very nicely after re-unification, when the Russians started to withdraw their forces (since they had a lot more budget problems, and the East Germans really didn’t like the “Big Brother Soviet” occupation forces that were stationed for decades to prevent an uprising). Although for decades East Germans had hated the Soviet soldiers, once they started packing up, the local towns near them started weeping because several hundred soldiers each week going shopping at the local ALDI was an important part of the economy in a small village. They even whispered that maybe, some soldiers could stay now that relationships were all so nice and everything… (The Russians would’ve liked to stay, too, compared to the conditions and infrastructure back home).
Well, I’m not motivated by a desire to hurt Germany. I’m just saying that they don’t command our forces; it shouldn’t be their choice whether we stay or not. In the absence of a clear purpose and in a time of deficits threatening first education, then things like SS and Medicare, and now the prospect of digging our own people out of the rubble of natural disasters fer crissakes, we ought to seriously consider shit-canning operations that have no clear purpose in favor of projects that plainly do.
Even if the answer to ‘What are we doing there??’ is ‘supporting the local economy’, Germany is doing well financially and I’m sure they could withstand some reduction in our presence.
Is that it? Are we their to prop up their economy?
The Germans in fact have organizations that lobby members of congress when certain installations are about to be shut down. I’ve been over here as an employee of the U.S. government since 2002 and our foot print has shrunk considerably. Everyone here is bracing for another round of cuts/consolidation in fact. I myself expect to move to Wiesbaden from Heidelberg in the next 12 to 18 months.
From a U.S. Army standpoint we do have some very valuable partnerships with a lot of the militaries here, Germany among them. Call the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq whatever you want but many of the nations here have deployed forces alongside ours in support of those efforts. Oftentimes these forces are able to take on tasks that could be done by U.S. forces. But when they take them on they free up our service members for more critical undertakings. A lot of our partnered nations are critically tied to training Afghan forces and to operating provincial reconstruction teams. I know their numbers are small but they are utilized in, for the most part, very effective ways.
Could you make the argument that these partnerships would be just as effective if we trained with our Croatian counterparts in places like NTC or at Fort Polk. Maybe but I think it’s much more effective when we do it in their country or at a place where it’s more affordable for them (such as here in Germany).
I can’t speak to how smart Ramstien is or isn’t … it’s a HUGE installation and we (the U.S. Army) have a very large installation next to that (Kaiserslautern). I know that when forces flow out of theater, it’s done through there. I’ve heard force projection and forward platform arguments but they only ‘sort of’ make sense to me.
Finally on the medical issue and Ramstien’s proximity to it, we have the best survival ration of any military in the world. If you survive the initial contact, odds are you’re going to live. If the docs that put this whole thing together think it’s better to evacuate a patient into Landsthule Regional Medical Center rather than to the U.S., I have to trust their record.
To defend Western Europe against the Warsaw Pact*, moron. Obviously, it’s no more clear that Western Europe needs defending from the Soviets today that it was that it needed defending from the Germans in 1950, but pretending the Soviets didn’t exist is silly.
*and never mind that conventional European forces plus American assets in Europe couldn’t actually have done more than slow down a Soviet invasion.
Ramstein is one of the remaining military bases in Germany. The number used to be very large, including places most people have never heard of, such as Karlsruhe and Mannheim. Many of them have been closed, including the Army’s 97th General Hospital. Ramstein is the tactical support base for our little experiments in the Middle East, and serves as the medevac center for wounded soldiers, particularly since Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt (home of the Army’s 97th General Hospital) was closed in 2005. Otherwise, air support would have to come from the US, which is not practical.
For perspective, we’ve still got upwards of a dozen bases in Germany, some of which are completely huge: The Ramstein/Landstuhl complex has over 50,000 Americans living there.
