$651,163,000,000. According to several sources, that is the amount that we will spend this year on the military budget.(1) For comparison's sake, China (according to China) will spend about $70.3 billion dollars in 2009. According to the Pentagon, China spends between 105 and 150 billion on their military, which is the second largest in the world--behind us of course.(2)
A review of the U.S. budget reveals that we spend about 23% of our money on Medicare and Medicaid, 21% on Social Security, 21% on the Military, and 17% on other discretionary spending (pork). So 82% of all of our federal spending is tied up into these four categories.(3) Now, initially, it may seem that we could cut any one of these categories if we wanted to find more money, for, I don't know, health care, or education, because they all make up similar size proportions of the overall budget. But, upon further consideration, a lot of discretionary spending is tied up in education, and Medicare and Medicaid are health care (both of which would see their costs plumet with a single payer health care system, because they are currently bloated by the greedy insurance and pharmacuetical industries). Personally, I would be OK with cutting Social Security, but the fact is that would leave a lot of elderly people on the streets, because many Americans have simply not adequately planned for their retirement.
That leaves the military. The fact that we currently outspend China, our next closest competitor, by a margin of 4 to 1, is absurd, and completely unjustified. I mean, I thought we had nukes? I am not suggesting that we become completely isolationist, but we ought to be able to maintain a functioning DEFENSIVE military, without spending 651 billion. If we could cut our military spending by just less than a third, that would free up 200 billion dollars per year that could be used to fund health care and education, or even to cut taxes. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to find out exactly how the military budget is spent, because on the Office of Management and Budget homepage, the descriptions of how the money is spent is quite vague. Still, here are some suggestions I would make after reading it through:
1) We are scheduled to spend 20 billion on growing the size of our military forces...why, other than the fact that our previous idiot of a president involved us in two wars, both of which our current president (it remains to be seen as to how he shall be remembered) seems keen on continuing? Why do we need to have a standing army of 547,400 people, other than to start imperialistic wars of choice, or to meddle in the affairs of other nations? If we were truly attacked, what we need is a strong navy and air force with which to launch missles to hit specific strategic targets. And by strong I mean having great capabilities to strike and strike effectively, not strength in numbers. The conventional wars where numbers matter are over.
2) 159.7 billion is allocated for daily operational needs. So it costs us more than China spends on its entire military budget to simply operate. This portion of the budget out to be audited to ensure that this money is necessary, and moreover, that it is wisely spent. With careful planning one should think that this number could be cut by a third, if not more.
3) We spend 49 billion on the national guard per year. It is not that the national gaurd is unimportant, but is it so crucial that we are spending almost 1 billion dollars per state to keep up? Rationally, the answer is no. It sees to me that this amount could easily be halved.
4) We also spend nearly 13 billion to continue building warships, submarines, and the like; 10.7 billion on space exploration; and 17 billion to modernize our naval fleets and procure new fighter jets and other machines of war. (All of the facts above are available through source 1--listed below)
I am in no way suggesting that a well funded military is not important, but the numbers on some of these allocations absolutely blows me away. We really ought to be able to get more for our military spending and cut out some of the unnecessary funding that is going on for purposes other than defending our nation in an the age of modern warfare.
Would this potentially mean that some contractors go out of business, or that some troops and defense department employees would have to find something different to do: yes, it would. And this is the crux of the problem with our country and its decision making process at this point: we simply seem unwilling to cut the fat out of our economic system. For instance, the Republican attack against health care reform is largely centered on preserving the enormous profits of the health care industry, despite the fact that it is wildly inefficient.
The fact is that our economy has to change, and change dramatically, if our way of life is going to continue, and that is going to mean that some industries will die out and that many of the people that work in those industries are going to lose their jobs. Tough shit. To continue to purposefully continue funding and supporting industries and systems that are inefficient, bloated, and derelict for the sake that they provide people with jobs is the antithesis of capitalism, and far worse than socialism, which at its best, would at least strive for purpose, if not efficiency. Honestly, it is the worst kind of welfare, and whoever utters the phrase, "too big to fail," ought to be drug out of their homes in the middle of the night by armed thugs and unceremoniously shot and left in the streets as an example to those that are too scared to accept change and sit enraptured on their couches by the fear mongering, conservative media.
As I have said before, and I will now say again, if the middle and lower class continues to be bled for money, the cost of health care and education continues to rise, and our tax dollars continue to buy us nothing that works toward the common good and our collective economic benefit, we are going to look like Mexico, which is a swindling, corrupt country, where the market is subject to the whims of drug lords, organized crime, and the casual direction of the wind, and capitalism fails because there is a general lack of law and order.
We need to cut the fat, and that means the military budget, the prison system, the health care industy, and the auto industry. It really is just that simple.
1) http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/rewrite/budget/fy2009/defense.html
2) Office of the Secretary of Defense - Annual Report to Congress: Military Power of the People's Republic of China 2009
3) Fiscal Year 2008 U.S. Federal Spending - Cash or Budget Basis
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Obama is a socialist? REALLY?!
Short Version: Really? Really? Obama is a socialist? Haha, what a laugh?! What an absolute fucking joke...only a senile, brain dead moron would believe such a crackpot statement.
Long Version: Dear readers, I apologize for my lack of published work lately...I have been quite busy moving out of Ninnyville, and running around galivanting here and there. In any case, this past weekend I spent time with some friends who insisted that Obama is pushing socialism, and that socialism won't work. Another idiot whom I'm related to recently sent me an email claiming some similar bullshit. Here's the email, and afterward I'll explain why I would accuse even friends and family of being idiots:
(Moronic email)"An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. Could not be any simpler than that."
First of all, let me say that a teacher's primary goal in issuing a test is to measure learning, which obviously if you are averaging test scores, is not going to happen. If this actually really even happened (the emailer in question is famous for sending along forwards that make false claims and fail to accurately cite sources), I hope that the students recieved a refund for the portion of their tuition that went to enrolling in this guy's class, as he apparently shirked his responsibility to educate his students, or appropriately measure their learning, in order to teach a politically motivated lesson that contains fundamentally flawed logic and that certainly does not belong on the campus of any university or community college.
More broadly, there seems to be this notion among conservatives that Obama is somehow a socialist, when the only significant piece of legislation that has passed under his watch was an economic stimulus package, which A) did not mandate that everyone in the U.S. be paid the same across the board, B) has effectively stopped the economic downward spiral caused by irresponsible laissez faire capitalist housing, banking, and finance policies, and C) is designed to be divyed out by a variety of methods, one of the most prevalent being contract bidding for public works projects, which uses market competition to seek the lowest price for the project.
The only legitimate attack on Obama for being socialist is to cite his support of a public health care option. Admittedly, this would be somewhat socialist, that is to say, the government would be entering a formerly private industry. In truth, what Congress is proposing is simply to provide a public option, allowing regular citizens to buy health insurance through the government. People would still, by the way, be able to buy private insurance--the idea is to drive down costs by providing effective competition, which actually sounds a lot more like capitalism to me--in fact, the only way the market would cease to exist is if the private companies weren't able to compete with the public option.
Ultimately, what we need to remember is this: no one would ever talk about socializing an industry that is effective at delivering a quality product to consumers and that provided healthy profits to its investors. Its precisely when capitalism fails, as we have seen recently with the banking, auto, housing, and health care industries, that the government steps in to regulate or socialize private industry. It has nothing to do with an underlying pinko conspiracy or a belief that government should be in charge of delivering goods and services to consumers. In truth, pure laissez faire capitalism fails for the same reasons that pure socialism like the idiot professor above was exemplifying, and that is because human beings are by their nature selfish and greedy, to the point that they will do things they know are wrong in order to benefit themselves exclusively to the detriment of those around them, the factor of which is largely determined by their access to money and power.
Therefore, good government policy ought to be directed by pragmatism, skepticism, science, and reason. The reason I accuse my relative who sent the email, and friends, of being idiots, is that they ignore their rationale faculties when informing their political position and then try to appeal to other people on an academic basis, the same basis they abandoned when they donned their political philosophy in the first place.
So, I mean, fuck it, go ahead and try to convince me that Obama is a socialist and that everything the Republican party does is sacrosanct, but you better come with something better than this--you better come with something better than Fox News talking points and Limbaugh rants that sound good but fall apart under even the most elementary cross examination. You better come with it, because if you don't, you're only going to contribute the the growing notion that conservatives are a bunch of batshit crazy assholes that believe ridiculous versions of Christianity, hate people that look different or believe different things than they do, and think that Sarah Palin is actually a good person.
Long Version: Dear readers, I apologize for my lack of published work lately...I have been quite busy moving out of Ninnyville, and running around galivanting here and there. In any case, this past weekend I spent time with some friends who insisted that Obama is pushing socialism, and that socialism won't work. Another idiot whom I'm related to recently sent me an email claiming some similar bullshit. Here's the email, and afterward I'll explain why I would accuse even friends and family of being idiots:
(Moronic email)"An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan". All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A. After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else. All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. Could not be any simpler than that."
First of all, let me say that a teacher's primary goal in issuing a test is to measure learning, which obviously if you are averaging test scores, is not going to happen. If this actually really even happened (the emailer in question is famous for sending along forwards that make false claims and fail to accurately cite sources), I hope that the students recieved a refund for the portion of their tuition that went to enrolling in this guy's class, as he apparently shirked his responsibility to educate his students, or appropriately measure their learning, in order to teach a politically motivated lesson that contains fundamentally flawed logic and that certainly does not belong on the campus of any university or community college.
More broadly, there seems to be this notion among conservatives that Obama is somehow a socialist, when the only significant piece of legislation that has passed under his watch was an economic stimulus package, which A) did not mandate that everyone in the U.S. be paid the same across the board, B) has effectively stopped the economic downward spiral caused by irresponsible laissez faire capitalist housing, banking, and finance policies, and C) is designed to be divyed out by a variety of methods, one of the most prevalent being contract bidding for public works projects, which uses market competition to seek the lowest price for the project.
The only legitimate attack on Obama for being socialist is to cite his support of a public health care option. Admittedly, this would be somewhat socialist, that is to say, the government would be entering a formerly private industry. In truth, what Congress is proposing is simply to provide a public option, allowing regular citizens to buy health insurance through the government. People would still, by the way, be able to buy private insurance--the idea is to drive down costs by providing effective competition, which actually sounds a lot more like capitalism to me--in fact, the only way the market would cease to exist is if the private companies weren't able to compete with the public option.
Ultimately, what we need to remember is this: no one would ever talk about socializing an industry that is effective at delivering a quality product to consumers and that provided healthy profits to its investors. Its precisely when capitalism fails, as we have seen recently with the banking, auto, housing, and health care industries, that the government steps in to regulate or socialize private industry. It has nothing to do with an underlying pinko conspiracy or a belief that government should be in charge of delivering goods and services to consumers. In truth, pure laissez faire capitalism fails for the same reasons that pure socialism like the idiot professor above was exemplifying, and that is because human beings are by their nature selfish and greedy, to the point that they will do things they know are wrong in order to benefit themselves exclusively to the detriment of those around them, the factor of which is largely determined by their access to money and power.
Therefore, good government policy ought to be directed by pragmatism, skepticism, science, and reason. The reason I accuse my relative who sent the email, and friends, of being idiots, is that they ignore their rationale faculties when informing their political position and then try to appeal to other people on an academic basis, the same basis they abandoned when they donned their political philosophy in the first place.
So, I mean, fuck it, go ahead and try to convince me that Obama is a socialist and that everything the Republican party does is sacrosanct, but you better come with something better than this--you better come with something better than Fox News talking points and Limbaugh rants that sound good but fall apart under even the most elementary cross examination. You better come with it, because if you don't, you're only going to contribute the the growing notion that conservatives are a bunch of batshit crazy assholes that believe ridiculous versions of Christianity, hate people that look different or believe different things than they do, and think that Sarah Palin is actually a good person.
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