Global Financial collapse

[Finnster]

Originally Posted by JERRY2KONE

I just read an AP story earlier this week about something like $30million that was spent in Afganistan on resources, construction, and contractor services to help the local people, that is now in the hands of the taliban. There is so much corruption and underground operations going on there that it will take decades to overcome and the USA no longer has the means or the funds to do this for other countries. We have got to stop pouring money into projects that do not directly benefit America and its citizens.

I would agree that we need to stop spending on projects that do not benefit the US people and its economy. The wars we are in I would def put into that catagory. Osama is dead, Al-queda is gone, but we are still spending $2B/week fighting goat-herders with homemade bombs and AKs with no end in sight.

I can't see how the Pentagon is not cut down. $700B/yr is an insane amt of money when we really don't have any credible enemies. Iran is weak. Russia? Don't think so. China? It would be an epic global disaster and shouldn't even be considered. We are too dependent on each other anyway, no one could win. Do we really need 11 carrier groups when at best China just got its first, and its a POS rebuilt Russian ship? How many simultaneous wars do we need to be equipped to fight at a moments notice?

Now I would not stop the research projects, and be careful about cutting any programs/bases/systems that would result in big job losses. Budgets need to come down, but immediate cuts are bad ideas. OTOH, all these overseas bases, and all this money we pour into foriegn bases and countries that could be spent at home needs to be strongly justified. Honestly I would shift quite a bit of money away to NASA budgets instead.

The thing I don't like about excess military spending is that it has little Return on Investment, and most of these things you can't use without incurring huge additional costs. However, every president that comes in has a huge temptation to use them as there is no real sacrifice asked of anyone before action starts.

EG. Cruise Missles are ~$1M+/ea. What's the ROI for that? It does nothing, earns nothing, and just sits on a ship ready to go consuming maintence costs. When its finally used (often with little public debate) it costs a whole more to the taxpayer afterward to replace it, and often rebuild the bridge we just blew up, or to payments to other parties to take our side in the action, or to the families of the people we accidently killed because we thought they were someone else. Every president since Bush I has launched hundreds of them themselves. Raytheon sold its 2000th last year, well before Libya where Obama launched over 100 the 1st day. For the quarter billion Obama has spent on cruise missiles, I can think of a lot more things around here that needs fixing and would put more people to work and not result in more wars.
Also, no one else bothers to spend any money on their military and just asks us to do all the bombing for them, (aka the Europeans.) They put their budgets towards universal HC and nice infrastructure, and we just get big Defense bills, crumbling bridges, bankrupted families from hospital bills, and the huge majority of dead and injured soldiers and bad international rep.

At least with NASA you get something cool that doesn't kill a bunch of people and make a bunch of enemies, plus you still get all the good tech and science research out of it (tho not that we should spend $700B/yr on NASA.) We now have to bum rides off Russians just to get our astronauts to the Space Station we mostly paid for, but we do most of the bombing in Libya bc our allies never bought any weapons to "protect" their oil supply in Libya. F'd up if you ask me.