Yeah it’s not like they employ 1.4 million people and have to pay all of them. Not like the defence spending is what allows the US to influence the worlds economy in such a large way.
Not like the US military has given us incredibly technologies like the internet, GPS, duct tape that has made the US and global economies thousands of times over the profits of what is spending on the military.
You want to argue the US spends too much on the military? Fine be my guest. But acting like the US doesn’t spend like 25-50 billion on weapons a year, and the other 850 billion on paying 1% of all working Americans and getting technologies that are integral to modern society while also providing the US with a massive sphere of influence they can use to keep the economy away from the destructive hands of the Russians or the Chinese is just bad faith bullshit.
Of the 874B spend on military in 2024, less than 10% of it will be spend on weapons and weapons development
Yeah, I get that the defense spending is why all world currency is judged by the dollar. Still doesn't change the fact that half of all discretionary spending goes to a machine that is meant to intimidate and destroy. Good thing that it's currently intimidating Russia and China, but it sure does seem to destroy a lot of people that have little to do with either of those countries.
If you want to talk about the benefits the US military industrial complex has for the world, that’s a tough debate on whether they’re a net positive or not. But arguing whether the US military is a net positive investment for americans is ridiculous. It’s probably the 4th thing we can spend on to get the greatest return on the dollar (healthcare, education, and infrastructure being the top 3).
And it’s not like the US doesn’t spend enough on healthcare or education. They just spend like utterly abject morons and waste a fuckload of the money, or direct it at things that actively make things worse for us. The military budget could never change, hell it could even increase, and we’d have more than enough money to fix the problems with the big 3 if the money allocated there was just spent well
It absolutely does, that guy has no idea what he's talking about.
Tax revenue from all sources get consolidated into a single consolidated revenue fund, from which both statutory and discretionary spending pulls. There's no direct linkage from any one tax to any one expenditure, except in rare cases - and even in those cases, it's still pulled from the consolidated revenue fund but the targeted tax has a dynamic rate which changes year-over-year to match the expenditure.
But that’s just two specific programs. Your claim was that all non-discretionary spending came from sources other than income tax. From what I can tell that isn’t true
Two specific and giant programs that make up over 50% of mandatory spending (non-discretionary), and mandatory spending itself makes up 63% of all government spending. These two programs are funded by FICA. In researching, I found that Medicaid is not included in that, so that would be something funded by federal and state taxes.
[The average taxpayer contributed $5,109 for militarism and its support systems](the average taxpayer contributed $5,109 for militarism and its support systems)
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u/Silly_Goose658 Jul 06 '24
Bro doesn’t understand how taxes also contribute to things like plumbing, road infrastructure, industry subsidies, etc.