It would be fascinating to hear more about where you get these ideas from.
What they’re saying is very much true, I’m curious of your upbringing & knowledge of the topic if you really think they’re wrong
We can't make it obvious that we want to build a large, well-educated, and financially stable middle class by dumping money onto it, so we build it up by dumping money into the DoD instead
FWIW, the DoD employs 1.3MM active duty service members, 750k civilians, and 800k National Guard and Reserve service members [1]. That's about 3MM people, generously rounding up. If you consider the surrounding defense industry, that's about another 800k jobs [3], so let's super-generously round up to 4MM. Considering that there are 207MM working age people in the U.S. [2], I'd be surprised if there was broad support for the DoD primarily on the basis of the number of jobs it provides or as a welfare alternative. That's $800k a year per job created! Seems fairly inefficient as a job creation scheme given the median salary in the U.S. is about $54k a year [4].
And compared to the 4MM jobs in defense, in 2019 roughly 59MM Americans were the recipients of some sort of welfare program [5].
1: https://trumpadministration.archives.performance.gov/defense...
2: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S
3: https://www.clearedconnections.com/security-clearance-news/s...
4: https://www.thebalancemoney.com/average-salary-information-f....
5: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/99674/...
Depending on how you count, defense industry could be 3.5 mil employees.
https://siteselection.com/issues/2012/sep/sas-military-econo....
Although now that I think about it, that's what ROTC is right? They pay for your education, and pay you to gain experience using that education on Defense, then when your obligation is met you can keep going or do your own thing with a patriotism-boosted resume. It's a win-win
The gist of the idea is that the Department of Defense is a (the?) major funder of all sorts of industry in the US, typically in the form of contracts for products and services.
Your hand waving pessimism seems clearly unwarranted in this case. You think scholarships are just getting fired off with no one knowing who, where, or when?
At a decent guess for upper bound size, I see an estimate of 56% overall AD officers coming from ROTC. 2018 DoD demographics report puts total AD O-1 population at 28000, which should be a two year rank, so cut it in half for your new officers per year of 14000. Add 10% for people failing out, and you get about 8600 officers per year in ROTC, or a total of 34000 since it's a four year program.
Of course, using companies as a medium for propagating welfare has its own problems
What do you base this idea on? Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we... puts per-capita and per-GDP welfare spending high into the list of developed countries,
> We can't make it obvious that we want to build a large, well-educated, and financially stable middle class by dumping money onto it,
More than is already dumped in by the vast welfare programs? Isn't government welfare expenditure greater than the entire defense budget?
> so we build it up by dumping money into the DoD instead and ensuring that just about every (genuinely innovative!) facet of American industry gets a piece of the pie.
> When the DoD is built into the lifeblood of your middle class like this, it is culturally impossible to audit it, because auditing it would reveal the truth so many Americans find embarrassing or politically repugnant: that their livelihoods come from government-driven funding intended to give them decent lives, not the invisible hand of the market.
How so? What kind of thing could an audit say that would cause the population to act in a way the ruling class or the DoD would consider undesirable? And what kind of action are you imagining?
My point is a very simple one: the DoD is as large as it is because the US has a cultural aversion to accepting welfare. We can't make it obvious that we want to build a large, well-educated, and financially stable middle class by dumping money onto it, so we build it up by dumping money into the DoD instead and ensuring that just about every (genuinely innovative!) facet of American industry gets a piece of the pie.
When the DoD is built into the lifeblood of your middle class like this, it is culturally impossible to audit it, because auditing it would reveal the truth so many Americans find embarrassing or politically repugnant: that their livelihoods come from government-driven funding intended to give them decent lives, not the invisible hand of the market.