The neocon list consists of North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Syria.
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Yes, but $6.5 tn.
Someone got it. And I bet it’s not in the ME any more.
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the military - besides being about fighting wars - is largely a welfare program. it gives people money for trade skills and university degrees. it gives families healthcare and childcare. and most importantly, it gives people jobs.
with major bases in every state, and the knockoff effects of military families spending money in the towns near those bases - we’d have serious hard times if that money went away.
it’s wretchedly inefficient, but the us isn’t about to start a department of peace or setup something like guaranteed income. while military spending needs to come down, we also have to figure out what all those unemployed present and future soldiers are going to do.
i personally think trump realizes this. his spending on ice, border patrol, the wall, the military, detention and prisions - that’s his real jobs program.
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I guess on a planet where the most powerful state runs a miltary economy. America’s largest domestically-produced industrial exports are weapons after all, and it’s foreign arms sales account for most (by volume) of the global market. 
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I’d phrase it “Wars which end in decisive victory are subject to less retrospective second guessing”, but you are mostly right.
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In MRAish circles “incel” means an involuntarily celibate, a man (<MRA>because these types of circumstances couldn’t happen to a woman </MRA>) who is celibate through “no fault” of his own. Presumably “volcel” is voluntarily celibate if that’s what the first means in “Straussian*” circles.
* I’m lazy, so i’m not reading @anon81034786’s links to find out who the right one or the wrong one is.
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As long as the voters keep falling for the idea that defense spending is a proxy for national defense, this bullshit will continue.
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I hear it’s in large bills in a container at the Vancouver freight docks.
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This is something of a corollary to the idea I’ve seen around here that when it comes to social spending, waste is less important than the goals of the spending. That as long as the noble goals are met, what’s a few hundred million this way or that if it helps you sell the whole package.
Key being as long as the goals are met. And that’s kind of the sad thing, that people are so utilitarian about war. If Iraq and Afghanistan had become models of enlightenment and a new Athens to light up the world, I’m not sure it still would justify the war.
#Really, boing-boing?
So, now you’re a Fake News perpetuator?
So, you followed up by going to some ersatz website no one has ever heard of, “mintpressnews.com”?
The fact that it does confirm Trump’s seemingly ridiculously large $6T figure is almost prima facie evidence that this is a faux site.
Everything I’ve read prior, that discussed lost/unaccounted-for money in Iraq cited figures in the billions, not trillions. If $6T were a bona fide figure, wouldn’t it have been front page of NYT/Wapo/BBC (basically anything banned from the WH Press Corp) long ago?
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It wouldn’t surprise me if, as an empirical matter, this is true; but given how soon after WII we started doing heavy Cold War procurement, I’d be inclined to suspect that not letting the warm glow of victory get in the way of unleashing the accountants would still have been an excellent plan.
Aside from the pure moral satisfaction of hunting down and crushing the guilty; the difference(in terms of procurement over time) between winning war A and moving on to preparing for war B and just getting bogged down indefinitely in war C are pretty small.
Hey maybe Erik Prince will get to build his private air force after all.
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Don’t you have any principles?
Of course not!
No morality?
I’m a very moral man, and Italy is a very moral country. That’s why we will certainly come out on top again if we succeed in being defeated.
You talk like a madman.
But I live like a sane one. I was a fascist when Mussolini was on top. Now that he has been deposed, I am anti-fascist. When the Germans were here, I was fanatically pro-German. Now I’m fanatically pro-American. You’ll find no more loyal partisan in all of Italy than myself.
You’re a shameful opportunist! What you don’t understand is that it’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
You have it backwards. It’s better to live on your feet than to die on your knees. I know.
How do you know?
Because I am 107-years-old. How old are you?
I’ll be 20 in January.
If you live.
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You do realise, presumably, that the money would not “go away” if defence spending “went away”?
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Y’know how US conservatives like to claim that Reagan defeated the USSR by tricking them into wasting all their money on military spending until the civilian economy collapsed?
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The poor.
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There’s a term for that kind of thing:
Military Keynesianism is the position that the government should increase military spending in order to increase economic growth. The term is often used pejoratively to refer to politicians who reject Keynesian economics except when arguing for the positive job creation of military spending
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And of course, in the postwar period, the US turned it to our economic advantage, by rebuilding Europe and Japan, in our socio-economic image. The Marshall Plan especially generated deep gains for American corporations. And of course, we were fighting nation-states that posed a clear and present danger to ourselves and others. The current enemy is far more amorphous and could most likely be dealt more productively in a very different manner than we have done since 9/11.
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Also, I bet if you went back and looked, the antiwar crowd that did exist (especially those who sympathized with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) indeed pointed to economics as a reason to try and persuade the US government to keep out of the war. In fact, the Nye Committee had only recent conclude a report meant to keep us from becoming actively involved in what was happening in Europe and East Asia:
You can see some of the documents on that here:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nye.htm
It really took the bombing Pearl Harbor to win over some antiwar folks.
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I’m not sure that’s the phrase I would use. Remember, that although it’s a huge bureaucracy, it’s still an organization, made up of human beings making choices (sometimes choices that are not either fully informed or not made on anything other than pure self-interest).
