I think you are greatly underestimating or at least greatly under-appreciating the role of USA defense on the world stage. Why do you think EU and other USA allies can get away with spending so little on defense? They are basically outsourcing defense and weapons development to us. F-35 development went way over budget, but actually making one now is relatively cheap and will continue to get cheaper - cheap enough that an ally like Israel could purchase a dozen as a part of their smaller defense budget in the coming decades like they currently do with F-16s. Why is the global shipping industry so much lower risk that it was in decades past? The US Navy protecting shipping lanes is largely to thank.
I'm sure US DoD is worthy of many of its criticisms, including high budget, but it irks me to see the baby so eagerly thrown out with the bathwater at every opportunity.
> I'm sure US DoD is worthy of many of its criticisms, including high budget,
That's precisely all that's been criticized here. The high budget of the DoD.
At least for me, the scare quotes around "defense" additionally imply that the US isn't really getting anything defense-related in return for the high budget - as if the money is just being wasted with no ROI.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262742/countries-with-th...
No, I enjoy not being invaded
The entire post-WWII world order has been to their benefit at our expense.
I’d rather my tax dollars go towards state run health insurance than protecting Germany from Russian shenanigans.
The USD is the world’s reserve currency and the US has benefitted enormously from 75 years of peace in Europe.
The EU has certainly benefited from US protection but even more so has the US, US companies (but sadly not all US citizens), from the US’s position as absolute top dog in the world.
Also the problems with the health care system are unrelated to the cost of the military.
What math are you using? From wiki: "F-35 program's expected acquisition costs to $406.5 billion, with total lifetime cost (i.e., to 2070) to $1.5 trillion in then-year dollars which also includes operations and maintenance" [0] whereas there is currently $1.75 trillion student loan debt [1].
1.5 trillion in 2070 dollars is less than 1.75 trillion in 2022 dollars and the latter doesn't include the next 50 years of higher education funding.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
[1]: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/stude....
Plus, the OC was definitely talking about the student loan forgiveness that's actually been approved. Which is a measly $300bn in comparison.
What were the estimates of costs at beginning of the F-35 program for the year 2022? I bet less than 406.5 billion dollars.
The two have nothing to do with each other.
I am against the financial sector bailouts as well, but it's important to note that the 2008 $700 billion bailouts were paid back
>> Early estimates for the bailout's risk cost were as much as $700 billion; however, TARP recovered $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit or an annualized rate of return of 0.6%, and perhaps a loss when adjusted for inflation.[3]
> I am all in for a more streamlined and lean State, but until that time, I think that Raytheon stock holders and Wall Street can share a bit of the current pie with the People
The people that will pay is taxpayers and consumers through higher prices. I'm fairly sure Wall Street will be fine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilizati...
I’m far from an expert, but isn’t the assumption that the cost of cancelling these loans will also be paid back indirectly now that loan holders have less of a financial burden?
It feels to me like giving people lower levels of debt, access to affordable education, and a social safety net to allow risk taking would improve our economy overall. Of course this isn’t what the government has provided at the moment.
> It feels to me like giving people lower levels of debt, access to affordable education, and a social safety net to allow risk taking would improve our economy overall. Of course this isn’t what the government has provided at the moment.
Right. Student loan forgiveness does nothing about lowering cost of education. If anything it doubles down as people will be more willing to borrow more thinking they will get it forgiven. It also discourages others to pay back their loans. The reason schools are crazy expensive because we encourage students to take out uneconomical loans. Basically a no questions asked loan given to any 18 year old attending an accredited school. Private lenders are more discerning and will consider the cost, major and profile of the student and offer a lower rate than the federal rate for borrowers with strong profiles (e.g. going to med school vs majoring in pottery at NYU)
Exactly.
Better yet: send every adult 10k, no qualifying criteria required. For those that pay taxes, they can think of it as a tax cut. For those that have student debt, they can think of it as debt being cancelled. For everyone else, they can think of it as cash. Or as a "dividend" a la Andrew Yang.
Not saying it's a great idea, but it makes more sense than this govt unintended consequece du jour.
The commonality is the politicians who hand out that money. Politicians who operate on behalf of their donor class and not on behalf of the American people.
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/heres-how-much...
Who paid that?
>The people that will pay is taxpayers and consumers through higher prices.
Are these the same taxpayers that now can't even afford cheaper prices because of the students debts or the debts of their children?
The speaker of the house herself affirmed recently that the president does not have the constitutional power to do this, and the court will likely agree. The president is using 9/11 educational legislation signed by Bush that focused on military and disaster victims for this blanket debt cancelation. It is a dramatic expansion of power that was never intended.
However, the court cannot consider the question unless someone can show actual harm by the president's action, and thus prove standing.
That standing may be denied in the trial court, but after a raft of appeals, SCOTUS may grant standing and remand. Then the trial begins, and we will have another set of appeals before us (and perhaps an injunction) when the trial concludes.
It will be a long and bitter road, strewn with disappointment, either way.
That likely narrows the list down to very few.
They would likely be silently blacklisted and would need to align with a party to survive.
I guess they could be independently wealthy, however, that narrows the list even further.
The effort to find standing will devolve to a "Citizens for Fiscally Responsible Government" group with no direct ties to the Republican party.
Whose going to take this to court?
The president?
maybe. If it becomes normalized, it would alter the cost-benefit dynamic in degrees even more and not place as much pressure on pursuing a more valuable degrees. Hopefully this is a one-and-done and we can be more creative going forward, like providing more grants for deeper, more fundamental degrees like chemistry, math, computer engineering, manufacturing, etc.
> same can be said about financial sector bailouts, agricultural subsides
agree. we need to let companies properly decompose. It unintuitively creates more growth, and new companies are created from the ashes. Injecting old companies with formaldehyde creates sclerotic monoliths.
I hate to stomp on your hope, but this is a late-stage step on the road to 'free' public K-16 in the US. Graduate degrees are already needed to provide the signal you could generate 40 years ago with undergrad. As to actual learning apart from the signal of a degree, the bulk of undergraduate educations, now that there is such a bulk, will provide progressively less value compared to top institutions where students are ready to learn, just as most public schools fall behind the well-known magnet schools that we all wish were more than exceptions to the rule.
Honest question, are they? At least as someone hiring for software engineering BS in CS is generally something I look for in a junior level candidate (I rarely pay attention to the education of a candidate with a few years under their belt), but no matter the experience level a masters has never added much, barring some really interesting projects.
Other fields might be different, but I don't think I'm the exception for software engineering.
> like chemistry, math, computer engineering, manufacturing, etc.
Good.
Some of us would prefer that the point of college is a better educated populace, not a better educated avarice. Let's keep the greed at bay.
> Let's keep the greed at bay.
Tell that to the university endowments.
You might as well have just said that. How about we say all the things you listed are bad and we should fight against all of them, and not justify any based on the others?
"Two wrongs don't make a right" - every parent to their children, basically.
3% of GDP is not unreasonable for US military spending. US GDP is estimated to be around $25-$26 trillion for 2022.
What's outrageous are countries in Europe spending sub 2% of GDP on defense and relying on the US to defend Europe from Russia.
I agree on the Europe comment. Very few countries meet 2%, with an average of 1.3% of GDP in the EU. Britain, France, and Germany (in that order) have the largest defense budgets but Germany's budget goes nowhere due to ludicrous procurement and general incompetence. And of course, Germany is currently doing as little as possible on Ukraine because it recklessly (intentionally?) got itself dependent on Russia. Also worth noting that while they have the largest by gross spending, percentage wise Germany is just 1.3%.
It's just a joke. The problem isn't the EU, to be clear. Europeans don't want war: WW2 is still in living memory and the Cold War split the continent in two. But we've helped finance our social services through neglecting defense, and when you're under the nuclear umbrella of the US, Britain, and France... Why bother? What are they going to do, stop protecting you? The Ukraine war seems to be demonstrating that conventional capabilities still have a place, even if you don't plan on leaving your own borders and are protected from invasion by someone else's conventional military and nuclear weapons.
This comment is becoming an incoherent stream of my thoughts, but it really annoys me when Europeans mock the US for its spending when they could be enlightened like us Europeans and have generous social services, not considering that the US is subsidising Europe's welfare states. And I'm not even American, I'm British. I have nothing against the rest of Europe, but the discourse is in many ways as ignorant and condescending about the US as the US discourse is ignorant and condescending about Europe.
You could spend 5% of your GDP in scrap and consultancy contracts and would be worse than a country spending 1% in good weapons.
By your logic Russia should have won already.
Nitpick: the world's only good superpower. China is a superpower too, but an evil one.
The Middle East begs to differ.
And where is the welfare return? It is a transfer of wealth towards a lucky and already privileged subset of the population, paid for by present and future taxpayers, many of whom are underprivileged.
The idea of welfare is wealth transfer from the more to the less privileged. But this seems like the opposite.
I am all in for a more streamlined and lean State, but until that time, I think that Raytheon stock holders and Wall Street can share a bit of the current pie with the People