*** The Official MAGAposting thread ***

[MadMojoMonkey]

"Adequate" is not really a worthy standard for a nation leading in innovation, IMO.

The fed only pays for interstate roads (highways), though, and those are pretty good (so long as you're not comparing them to German roads, lol). Most of the shitty roads are owned and maintained on state or local levels and they're quite often shit.
I am biased. StL has some of the worst maintained roads in the country, according to various surveys.

I'd say our colleges and universities are world class, but the lower education system is extremely hit and miss. Public schools vary wildly in quality, and even charter schools and other less public options can be average at best.

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The economics of war is hard to wrap my head around.
I think of the Apollo missions and I want to say John Glen once retorted to criticism over the cost of the program by saying something to the effect of, "We didn't leave any bags of money on the moon. All that cost went to American scientists and businesses and went back into the American economy."

I know it's not a direct correlation to war costs. It's just not directly clear that spending money on bombs is a direct negative. Those people who got paid to make the bombs presumably spend their money on other American enterprises, enriching them and enabling them to innovate.

I think both Poopy and ong are making good points about this. The cost of the bombs could have gone into any research and had the same trickle-down effect on the rest of the economy. But the stability of the dollar is buoyed by our military strength. We use military strength to encourage other nations to buy into our dollar so they have a stake in keeping it stable.

[OngBonga]

It's not because the US needs to overspend on military to protect itself.

I was thinking more along the lines of securing resources to maintain economic dominance. Oil. Geopolitics seems to me to revolve around the petrocurrency. It's not about protecting themselves from military threats, it's about protecting themselves from someone else controlling global resources and shutting USA out. That would hurt America a lot more than a bomb in New York.

All you have to do is look at a graph showing how the US spends more on military than the next ten biggest spenders combined to get an idea of how out of control it's gotten.

Even the Russians can't compete with this level of corruption. Obviously the interests of arms dealers and lobbyists are an important factor.

Not sure what this has to do with the conversation. No country is anywhere near capable of sinking the dollar, and military spending is not what's keeping it up.

I agree that no country can sink the dollar. Those who have tried have been destroyed. We're moving into conspiracy theories here, but there were suggestions that Saddam Hussein was trying to sell his oil in Euros while others were looking to dump their dollar reserves and boost their alternative currency reserves, ie take contingency measures predicting the collapse of the dollar. America nipped it in the bud. Whether this is true or not, idk, but it makes some degree of sense on the surface.

Military spending is what's keeping the dollar propped up, at least to a degree. America need a powerful deterrent against their enemies.

According to them, military power comes from economic power, not the other way around.

This may be true, but military power may be necessary to maintain economic power, at least in today's world.

Historically, there is a pattern of being the strongest country on the planet and the response to the inevitability of losing that status (someday) is to spend more and more on military to try to protect that status with the effect being that the status gets lost faster than it naturally would.

History doesn't take into account technology. For example, the first nation to create a viable army of nanobots will be very powerful and might never lose their status as top dog. How do you dislodge them from their economic dominance? They can take what they want, they can defeat who they want, they can infiltrate and control anyone they want.

The UK, France, and Spain have all been in the US' position in the last few centuries.

This was before toasters existed, let alone thermonuclear weapons.

USA might not maintain their status as the world's most powerful nation, but history isn't a consistent and reliable indicator of what happens in the future. Eventually, someone will remain at the top and be impossible to dislodge. That might be USA.Or it could be someone else.

For the US, this problem is multiplied by the corruption that leads it to not just overspend, but overspend to an absurd degree.

This will probably be their downfall.

[Poopadoop]

I was thinking more along the lines of securing resources to maintain economic dominance. Oil. Geopolitics seems to me to revolve around the petrocurrency. It's not about protecting themselves from military threats, it's about protecting themselves from someone else controlling global resources and shutting USA out. That would hurt America a lot more than a bomb in New York.

Right, but the US doesn't need middle east oil anymore. I suspect their interest in that region is largely fuelled by the Israeli lobby and the military-industrial complex.

Even the Russians can't compete with this level of corruption. Obviously the interests of arms dealers and lobbyists are an important factor.

It does seem rather hard to justify that the most powerful country in the world, which leads a coalition of many of the other most powerful countries, spends so much.

Military spending is what's keeping the dollar propped up, at least to a degree. America need a powerful deterrent against their enemies.

Which enemies are threatening America again? If you say Russia I will lol.

The enemies the US has been cultivating would have no chance against 1/100th of America's strength in a conventional war. That's why they fight guerrila wars that emphasise different objectives. Rather than fighting for territory or to destroy the other side's army, they use ambush tactics to sap morale. This is a serious problem when you invade a country where the population hates you, and regular people are willing to die just to get you out of their country. These kinds of wars are practically unwinnable. You can't beat this kind of warfare by just pouring money into your military. You should just save your money.

This may be true, but military power may be necessary to maintain economic power, at least in today's world.

It always has been. But, it's a question of ROI. If you spend trillions on a war that gains you billions (or nothing, which is more common) in economic gain, you're weakening your economic strength which in turn will weaken your military strength. You want to spend your resources effectively, by fighting wars where you're either directly threatened or where you can expect the economic benefits to outweigh the costs. Granted, there are other reasons to fight, but the idea that any of the wars the US has been involved in since WWII have benefitted it seems pretty unlikely to me.

So why fight them? I'm not sure, but certainly the military-industrial complex likes war, so there's that force pushing. Also, the populace tends to get behind the leader when wars happen, so there's another incentive in an election year. These seem to be more likely reasons than that those wars are good for the country.

History doesn't take into account technology. For example, the first nation to create a viable army of nanobots will be very powerful and might never lose their status as top dog. How do you dislodge them from their economic dominance? They can take what they want, they can defeat who they want, they can infiltrate and control anyone they want.

Military spending on research is definitely worthwhile. You don't want to be caught using a musket when the other side is using AK47s. Not sure what % of total US spending is on research, but I'm guessing it's much less than 50%.

One problem though is high-tech weapons are expensive. It takes $100k to train and equip a single US soldier, never mind what tanks and planes and ships cost. $100k is a lot to spend on a guy that can get killed by a bomb some peasant made using fertilizer and spare clock parts.

USA might not maintain their status as the world's most powerful nation, but history isn't a consistent and reliable indicator of what happens in the future. Eventually, someone will remain at the top and be impossible to dislodge. That might be USA.Or it could be someone else.

Anything's possible.

[OngBonga]

The shareholders are still spending that money in the US, presumably...

Well, at least some of it for sure.

Saudi Arabia was "this close" to being another Vietnam, as I understand it. They had the oil and both the US and the Soviets wanted access to it. I'm not sure of the details as to how diplomacy prevailed over war in that case. The Saudi's ended up siding with us for whatever reasons, and we them.

At any rate, Saudi oil is running out in our lifetimes (source is my roommate, a Saudi engineer working in the oil industry). So this issue might have a shorter fuse than we think.

I'm not sure why we (the West) are allied to Saudi Arabia instead of just taking their oil. We could've taken control during WWII. But we didn't. But yeah, their oil will run out, and when it does they become an irrelevance. That's when Venezuela becomes a major player, one way or another.