I am not saying Federal Reserve actions don't have a cost, but comparing that to defense spending is apples to oranges. The federal reserve buys securities and created SPVs. You could say that is a cost but by some measures the money the Federal Reserve "spent" made money in the 2009 crises. If that were true this time your cost per tax payer is way, way off.

Or to put it in more plain language, you are comparing the cost to tax payers if the US government bought $60,000 of Lockheed martin stock as opposed to paying Lockheed Martin $15,000 for a fighter that doesn't seem to work well. It's more complicated than that even, but still it is a terrible and biased comparison that you are making.

For that, you need to calculate the cost of every US govt program and calculate usage costs. Very complicated.

However, this statement is confusing to me. Do you agree to a bailout, as a society, to eventually get all of it back?

And, I also take issue with 100M tax payers. Are these Individual Income Tax payers? If so, what about all the non income tax payers and companiss that pay taxes? For every item you buy, some amount goes to the government in the form of sales tax.

And ultimately, what does the govt spend money on? You and your fellow citizens. Sure, now you are in a position to say you pay more taxes than the govt provides services, but if your kid turns out to be poor and homeless, the govt ought to take care of them, and they pay no taxes while enjoying govt services. So if you compute what you get back, would it be fair to say you have to take multi generational values?

Un-normalized: $6T + interpretation + understanding + doubt that it's really $6T.

Normalized: $60k (get the GAO to provide a standardized number) + interpretation + understanding.

I get that it's imperfect but I have a hard time understanding how the "un-normalized" version is more-perfect or more comprehensible than the "normalized" version.

I suspect politicians would hate my suggestion: they've acclimated us to nonsense numbers. Per Dirksen (maybe): “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money." Again, I'm not pro/con high-speed rail but: CA probably has 15M taxpayers; estimates of high-speed rail ranged from $30,000M-$100,000M; how in the world was a CA taxpayer to recoup $3,000-$10,000 of cost? Put in those terms, it's a lot easier for me to think about the proposition.

I definitely think a Covid bailout was necessary. I do have some questions about where my $60k went...

Also, the $60,000/tax-payer Covid ticket price (though I find that source questionable) is missing averaging out over multiple years as you said yourself. Needs to be consistent with the other number.

This type of comparison reminds me of how people abuse statistics by comparing a city (or even a neighborhood) to another state (or even a country); say the average New Yorker vs. the average Swede.

Sure, it's $60k per tax payer by just dividing the total paid by the tax payer cardinality. And in that sense, that much of the federal budget that you have a voice for was allocated in that way.

However, comparing that number to how much tax you're paying in a given year is wildly inaccurate. The mean income tax paid in the US last year was ~$15k, but the median is closer to ~$5k [0] The ultra wealthy pay very disproportionately more of the total income tax and skew the mean upward significantly.

Therefore, the average US tax payer would have contributed likely far less than $300/year at something more like <$100/year.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-fed...

It's only broken down by category though (e.g. Health, Defence, Education), except for Welfare, which has subcategories (e.g. Aged, Disability, etc).

There's an example and further explanation here on the ATO website: https://www.ato.gov.au/Individuals/Lodging-your-tax-return/I...

There's a certain sense of satisfaction in being able to see in slightly more real terms what my tax is being spent on.

But it's misleading, perhaps deliberately so. The money is not being spent on "Health" but on the "Health department". What percentage of that money actually delivers health, and what merely funds the bureaucracy?

Here in the UK only about a third of defence spending goes on the armed forces themselves. Another third goes on service pensions, which is fine, but running the MoD itself is a full third of the budget! It wouldn’t surprise me if the same was true of the NHS.

Theirs is a system called "tributary taxation." How it works is, anybody who is anybody in Russia has a boss. Not a boss like you have a boss, a political boss, think Boss Tweed back in the day. That boss has a boss, who has a boss, and so on until you have the one person in Russia all this money flows to, President Putin.

How much do you pay to your boss? As much as you wish/can. This isn't the mob. The price for falling behind isn't Ivan turning your knees into baseballs. You simply find yourself slowly forced out of political relevance. Pay to play at it's highest and finest. At a certain level you become untouchable by low-level cops and the like.

The government getting its operating budget from us makes the government accountable to citizens in the end. What we call 'corruption' becomes the norm otherwise.

More here: https://www.quora.com/Will-Russia-abandon-the-tributary-taxa...

0: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/how-public-spendi...

1: https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Managing_the_economy/The_m...

Not exactly what you're describing, but here's where someone did a fairly detailed analysis of which federal, state, and local programs their salary goes to using a Sankey diagram:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/lkfjea/oc_...

Printing dollars what means high inflation what is basically a hidden tax that screws lower and medium class the most?

But from the article

> The Air Force alone wanted nearly 1,800 F-35s to replace aging F-16s and A-10s and constitute the low end of a low-high fighter mix, with 180 twin-engine F-22s making up the high end.

> Fifteen years after the F-35’s first flight, the Air Force has just 250 of the jets.

I'd say it's just as valid of an argument to make in this case that I'm not sure I won't see more than $60,000 of value out of efforts to prevent the economic infrastructure of the U.S. from crumbling, especially amortized over 50 years ($1,200/yr in preserved income or purchasing power).

I don't disagree that it's a decent frame of reference to use when looking at government programs...but it's important to apply the same level of rigor to measuring output value.

If you have a decent amount, then yeah, the asset price inflation came from a fire hose none other.

Also, the Federal Reserve spending is not backed by taxes.

what's wrong with just using the jets we already have. I mean we have like a gazillion of those things. what percentage of the military/armed forces is currently being used or has been used over the last 10 years. I'm guessing it's a very small percentage.

No politician wants to be the one to make the case to shut down the factories that produce these things, even when the military has advised Congress to do so [1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-t...

Instead we have jets we don’t need, and tanks sitting in a desert unused.

Two words: metal fatigue. Every airframe only has a finite amount of hours it can fly before its structure becomes too weak. Fighters in particular that regularly perform high-g manoeuvres. So they have to be replaced anyway.

The war in Afghanistan saw Western militaries burning off airframe-hours at a phenomenal rate using expensive fighters designed for neer-peer conflicts to drop dumb bombs, when you could have done the job for a fraction of the cost with simple propeller planes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano

The problems with the F-15/F-16/F-18 is that Chinese and Russian missiles might be able to shoot them down more easily than the F-22 or F-35, since the F-22 and F-35 are stealthed.

The problem with the F-22 and F-35 is high unit cost, so they can't have as many as they'd like.

It's also possible that their stealth might not work so well on future Russian/Chinese radars, for example they might use different frequencies. You can be sure both those countries are working on countermeasures to stealth aircraft.

Possibly the solution will be an unmanned aircraft. This would be able to pull >10g manouvers, which aircraft with a pilot in can't.

Simple as that.

This is also pretty typical - while many western nations 'care' about human rights, they don't see any problem with arming client regimes who are often gratuitously sadistic, genocidal, etc.

I'm also not sure where human rights come into the picture when you consider the various US wars in the last century. All of them (especially the Korean war) were extremely brutal to civilian populations, and the prosecution of all of them (except maybe the 1990 gulf war?) skirted very close to the line on war crimes, or crossed that line entirely. I don't think there was even lip service paid to human rights in this period.

* Arming the Saudi regime with intent to sustain the horrors in Yemen

* Extrajudicial killings with drones in various sovereign non-warring nations such as Pakistan and Libya often with far more civilian casualties then combatant.

* Illegal indefinite detention and torture in offshore prison such as Guantanamo.

Those are the human rights horrors which the USA military is currently engaging in. History shows us that it is capable of far worse and there is no reason to believe it won’t engage in in the near future.

As far as security goes there is little reason to believe that it extends any further then to secure the interest of private companies engaging in foreign affairs. It seems to me that the human rights narrative of GPs is entirely fiction.

My stonks went up by way more than $60k (that figure is completely wrong and inflated anyway), so I saw plenty of it.

I'm sorry, were you fishing for a different answer?