In my opinion it is bad news for liberals. It’s an example of a popular political position that the Democrats have kind of boxed themselves out of capitalizing on. They’ve allowed Republicans to outflank them on a few issues that would be great progressive agenda items if they’d taken them on instead. “Everyone” (not really everyone, but the average normal person) knows the US spends too much on wars and shouldn’t do that, and should spend that money on better things.
The extremely insane wing of the Republican party has decided it doesn’t need to follow a lot of the old Beltway wisdom, and I think that’s going to let them take advantage of a lot of low-hanging fruit. The current Democratic party follows all that old wisdom like a religious text.
Yeah, if the Republicans who were proposing this weren’t so Trumpy-unreasonable, they’d actually have pulled off a clever chess move. Most Democrats are in favor of the defense budget; that budget routinely sails through both houses of Congress with about 80% support. So if the Republicans seriously propose military budget cuts, it will put a sizable number of Democrats in an uncomfortable position, sort of like calling their bluff.
I’ve long felt that someone like Trump could have legitimately argued for single-payer universal healthcare on three pillars of “Replace shitty Obamacare with something greater”, “it saves money” and “America deserves the best, time to put Canada in its place” and he’d have actually outflanked the libs. But he couldn’t even play 2D chess, let alone 5D like that.
It won’t matter. The GOP have been openly insulting our troops for a couple of years now and it hasn’t moved the needle. Ted Cruz circulated a video calling the US military “woke” and “emasculated” and praising the Russian military* and while it pissed off some veterans it hasn’t really affected his overall popularity (such as it is). Tucker Carlson has done likewise repeatedly and his ratings continue to rise. Donald Trump could shoot a Vietnam POW on Fifth Avenue and it wouldn’t make a difference.
And this is why social security at least should be taken completely out of the equation. All of that money paid out comes from either dedicated payroll taxes, interest from the trust fund, or taxes on OASDI payments. From the SSA:
In 2021, $980.06 billion (90.1 percent) of total Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance income came from payroll taxes. The remainder was provided by interest earnings $70.1 billion (6.4 percent) and revenue from taxation of OASDI benefits $37.6 billion (3.4 percent).
By the way, I admit I don’t know much about the federal budget, but the pie chart I found shows DoD at 18.74% of the total, and that percentage would be much higher (nearly 23% by my calculations) if social security were taken out of the mix. Another one had 18% under the category of “Military.” So I don’t know where the 10% alleged figure is coming from.
The “Baby Boom” generation (1946-1964) was the largest, most wealthy, and most mobile generation in American history. It is also the last to experience geometric progression in growth. More “Boomers” left the farm or factory, went to college, and moved to urban or suburban lifestyles where children became a large expense rather than a net labor benefit, and so they produced children at barely a replacement rate. The birthrate from 1965 to 1975 dropped precipitously, resulting in a contraction in “Gen X” and since then has held pretty steady through the new millennium with most net growth actually occurring through immigration. “Millennials” and “Gen Z” have held pretty steady, but the “Next Generation” (there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on what to call them yet) born after the 2007-8 crisis are significantly contracted.
The problem with waiting for “Boomers” to die off is two-fold; first, they’re healthier, have access to better care, and generally living substantially longer than their preceding generations. The other is that they have acquired and retained a vast amount of available capital which they are using to fund their retirement, including real estate, which has driven up costs and reduced available resources for everyone coming after them, forcing Gen X and Millennial (and presumably those that have come after them) to fund their education and advances through debt, which has served as a pseudo-capital base for economic growth. This means that both the tax base is contracting as the population of marginally contributing retirees is increasing, and the younger populations are in more debt than has ever existed in the US economy that they will never be able to pay down. And the United States is far better positioned than most other countries; I think the only nations that are even in comparable positions are New Zealand and maybe Australia.
We’re barely spending anything to support Ukraine, and most of the weapon systems and ordnance that has been provided has been stuff the DoD was going to have to destroy or surplus anyway. That US defense spending is way out of proportion to other nations in terms of percentage of GDP needs to be understood in the context that the United States, while not technically an empire, maintains a global security apparatus in order to foster and facilitate international commerce, which has benefitted everyone (even our competitors) and makes tacit if not explicit support and exchange with the US an indispensable aspect of participation in the global economy. From a standpoint of defending the continental United States and outlying states and territories from attack and invasion almost none of this necessary, and the argument can be made that having such a vast force in reserve encourages needless military adventurism.
However, the United States would not be the global economic power it currently is without this security. Whether that is a good thing or not depends upon your view of American hegemony; many people certainly believe that the United States is an “exceptional” country that supports and buffers democracy around the globe, while if you follow Noam Chomsky you’re more inclined to believe in the destructive capacity of the US in fostering its own corpo-capitalist interests. Regardless, “defense” is far more than just about defending the population against foreign attack, and spending on defense needs to be considered in that larger context.
I’ll say it as I have in the past; we didn’t need a Space Force because we already had USSPACECOM which was a command within the US Air Force and before that a Unified Combatant Command that supported all services. As a separate branch it offers new uniforms and more staff positions, but it is unclear to most people what it actually does. We do actually need a command with those functions because orbital space is a new area of international competition but we should avoid making orbit a field of open warfare because the ultimate consequence is denial of space access and resources for humanity for decades or even centuries.
Well, the alternative is to start killing them off, and I don’t think anyone is seriously proposing that.
I understand all the demographics and trends you were describing, but that wasn’t what I was asking. The baby boomers will start dying off. The ratio of retirees to workers will start to come down, their accumulated wealth will start going to their younger heirs, their homes will come on the market. When will we start seeing those things happening?
The problem is that the population after the Boomers isn’t that much larger, and is overall even healthier and likely to be longer-lived going into retirement (all things being equal) with a larger part of their wealth going into discretionary spending (travel, luxury goods) and health care. So the demographic pyramid is becoming more of a slightly tapered column with that “ratio of retirees to workers“ never decreasing unless the retirement age significantly increases (and employers are willing to hire 65+ age for jobs). This is also complicated by the concentration of wealth, which renders fewer would-be inheritors actually acquiring the wealth of their parents (either directly or through vocational advancement), the onset of automation of intellectual labor by “artificial intelligence”, and a general decline of economic growth.
The oldest Baby Boomers* are only turning 77 this year; the youngest ones are only turning 59, and are still some years away from even beginning to draw on Social Security (especially as, if you were born after 1959, you can’t retire with full SS benefits until age 67).
It’ll be a while before the impact of the large Baby Boomer cohort on Social Security starts to diminish.
Edit: this article indicates that it’s projected that, by 2029, 20% of the U.S. population will be age 65+, up from 14% in 2012.
*- While the exact definition of the Baby Boomer years varies a bit, depending on source, the most typical definition I’ve seen places it as birth years 1946-1964.
Still, has someone, somewhere, generated a graph of the average age of the U.S. population (or percentage of the population over retirement age) and projected it into the future? Will that reach a maximum, and when, or will it just keep going up forever?
Perhaps this is a Factual Question, but it does seem somewhat relevant to this thread.
There’s still room for a middle ground, here. We can maintain our treaty obligations and still lose a lot of our military. Aircraft carriers, for instance: If we’re fighting to defend NATO countries, we can base our aircraft on airfields in NATO territory. If we’re defending South Korea or Japan, we can base them in those countries. Carriers are only useful when we’re fighting in places where we don’t have allies nearby, which means situations where we’re not defending anyone.
Of course, that won’t be where Republicans target their cuts. They’ll go after the things that we’ve already committed to, that our servicemembers agreed to as part of their terms of joining, like the GI bill education benefits and the VA hospitals.
It’s not going to peak any time soon, according to cites I’m finding. Part is the Baby Boomers, but part is longer life expectancy for people who reach age 65, as well.
There are a lot of reasons to promote immigration but the demographic issue is kind of a secondary one. Fundamentally, we need to restructure how entitlement programs and retirement works because we physically cannot have an endlessly growing population to maintain a pyramidal demographic.
We’ve already seen the schism. I think what we’re seeing now is the MAGA wing starting to win. The Freedom Caucus was formed pre-Trump, if I remember correctly. There’s a definite throughline with the Tea Party, then the Trump era, and now post-Trump MAGA maniacs.
It’s changing the Democratic party, too. Republicans became MAGA or Never Trump, Democrats changed to try to exploit Never Trump rhetoric, and now you have a significant chunk of the “moderate” political contingent that is just what used to be a mainstream right winger, changing what is considered moderate policy.
The Democratic shift toward center-right happened long before Trump, and essentially corresponded with their wide adoption of being the party of corporate-capitalist boosters seeking big donor money for electoral war chests. Bill Clinton is the first obvious example but I think the shift was in progress even prior to that.
But you know even if they did curtail defense spending, rather than those programs the Pubs would instead shift it to harassing women, gays, and brown people.
You’re right, but it’s not an insurmountable challenge. While population cannot grow forever, we have seen immense growth in productivity which continues today, and will likely continue as automation technologies mature. This massive growth in productivity has seen its gains largely concentrated at the top (as you aluded to earlier when you mentioned the concentration of wealth). Those gains could be distributed differently, in ways that would ensure we can fund things like healthcare or retirement benefits.
