this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2023
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Just tax billionaires and we can have all of the above and a surplus budget.
How about we tax billionaires and also not give giant gifts to defense companies every year?
unless conflicts end worldwide I want my country to maintain the highest level of military technology and local capacity to ramp up if needed. That being said I don't want my country involved with every conflict in the world.
If the USA wouldn't be randomly invading countries every few years, they could keep the same level of military technology while spending much less.
The Iraq war did nothing to increase the US military's capabilities but just wasted enourmous amounts of money while killing civilians on a daily basis.
Yeah but it also gave us the Saddam Hussein outline meme.
Trillions well spent.
NCD user spotted
that's not how technology works, stuff will get outdated if we use it or not
for sure. To boot that was done while backgrounding afganistan which was the main 9/11 thing and caused it to go on forever since it was neglected.
As a Finn I don't want the US to stop fully... but they have a huge amount of excess, it's insane how much money they waste
Understandable
Good news, they could reduce it by 400 billion a year and still spend more than the the other 3 biggest spenders combined
If it's at the expense of everything else that could help the state of the country and quality of life, what's the point?
I'm pretty sure the U.S. can do that without an $816.7 billion defense budget, much of which goes to giant corporations, and without being larger than the next 20 militaries combined.
How about we do a $400 billion defense budget and only be larger than the next 10?
The biggest expenses, by far, are personnel costs and maintenance. The idea that the defense budget is a giant gift to contractors is just not backed up by evidence.
oh yeah but that is still money to defense companies. What you said here is pretty much what I meant. Just enough to maintain top tech levels and ability to ramp up and thats it.
There is N-word that will burn some asses: nationalize.
Watching Ukraine absolutely stonewall Russia using cold era tech has been incredible. Imagine what modern equipment could do. I can't wait to see what happens when they get f-16s, which were developed in the mid 70s by the way.
The last time US was involved in a war that even remotely had something to do with US was WWII. Before that it was probably civil war.
There is N-word that will burn some asses on lemmy.world: nationalize.
You mean mercenaries and arms dealers. The only thing they're defending is their profits.
I can't believe how many people on Lemmy of all places are defending massive defense budgets.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Yeah, because that for sure will stop other world powers from arming themselves and attacking others.
And to answer upcoming question: why we should care not others instead of ourselves. No one attacks us militarily (we are attacked via hubris warfare with disinformation such as this though) because we are armed.
Not just billionaires; corporations.
If we consider corporations people (and the Supreme Courts says we have to) then we should tax their income. That means total income, not profits because I don't pay taxes on what's left over after my bills, so why should corps get to?