Cutting back

How would the US military live on only $100 billion a year? The base closures of the 90's already leaned out the military a lot. What else could they cut?

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    No avocado toast for the officers

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    All of the branches on $100B?

    You would have to instantly dissolve ~50-70% of all forces and mothball most larger assets (ships, tanks, planes).

    Also instantly cut all future major development projects, no ohio-class replacement, no future CVNs, SSN(X) canceled, DDG(X) done, NGAD and NGAD also done, gut B-21 orders, etc, etc.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Don't forget
      >No more VA
      >Drastically cut back on pensions
      >No more Tricare
      >No more spousal benefits
      The majority of the military budget is gibs, not bomber maintenance

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >enlistment drops to zero
        Great job moron.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      how about 100B each branch

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        That's a lot easier to do, curb major development projects and greatly reduce procurement, but you can probably maintain what you have with only ~20% of existing forces needing to mothball.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          so, sure, the talk about cutting the budget etc but how would you go about forcing them to reprioritize for more more organizationally healthy things?
          Being able to account for their assets, better VA funding, not making soldiers live in mold, etc?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            They wont unless they're legally forced to do so, and likely even then will need extensive oversight to actually do it.

            With the current military the only way you see some drastic shift in organizational priority and the care of veterans is with a MASSIVE budget increase and some enforcement teeth to make sure that actually happens.

            I can't see any possible way currently to reduce spending and increase VA care/funding while also promoting a more healthy organization from within. Those in power in the military and the federal government will simply never let this happen, and the few in power who WOULD support such measures have too little influence to matter.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              What a healthy and functional government.
              Thanks.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The soft-serve ice cream machines in Abrams tanks would likely be rendered non-functional due to lack of maintenance.
    A crushing blow to the morale of tank regiments.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Unacceptable, to even think that'd be an option is cruel at best.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      When they got rid of the soft serve machine in the Abrams and replaced it with a coin-operated gumball machine, I knew we were in trouble.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      It’s bad enough air conditioning, button push track tensioning, and the toilet all got cut. how much more barbarity can armored crewmen take before they rebel.

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Don't cut shit. We're basically at war with the vatniks right now so, if anything, we need to INCREASE spending. I'm willing to sacrifice butter and build victory gardens to make sure Ukraine pushes back these fricking orcs.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >We
      When is your flight?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I can't fight, I'm disabled. I would if I could, though. It would be great dropping a grenade from a drone to kill some r*ssians.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          We should do the opposite of what the Russians are doing. Instead of hauling the anti-war protestors to the front line we should be sending all the fricking morons who want to start ww3 to Ukraine on the first thing smoking.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            vatniks want to start ww3. i'm just cheering on Ukraine because they are preventing it. doing my part, why not you?

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              I just heard the Ukrainian foreign minister on NPR saying that if Ukraine falls then other dicktaterships will challenge the status quo.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Yes. Which means we need to send more weapons and advisors. More $ needs to be given to these programs. After russia is kicked out of Ukraine, then we can discuss partitioning russia. the country shouldn't exist.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                How does everyday life change for the average Ukrainian peasant if he is ruled by Putin or as Zelensky?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                have you seen what is happening in russia? no freedom of speech, religion, press. No rights for, not just lgbt, but for everyone which is almost as bad. Ukraine stands for freedom since Zelenskyy admires the West, relies on the West, and believes in Western values.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I see Ukrainan villagers still don't have running water either. So what's the difference from Russia?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >I see Ukrainan villagers still don't have running water
                vatniks bombed it, moron.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Ushanka Show did videos on how his parents lived in Ukraine before the war. Has grandparents didn't have gas or running water and that village during Soviet times and now his parents have the same conditions.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                How is Russia going to fix that when they have a larger percentage of the population in the same situation?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                The Ukrainian people will have a far better economic future independent of Russia. That is real material difference for them and their descendants.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Living freely or living in a police state. Ukrainians would probably get deported to Siberia and Ukraine would get repopulated by Russhits.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                What do you think Maidan was about?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I heard it would have been a pride parade if C-14 had not shown up.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Making sure moronic family members of US congressmen benefit from ukranian natural resources?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          While being a leftist should be considered a disability, you can likely still fight

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      To be honest, we're not concerned about russia outside of a nuclear attack, which we can't really do anything about even if we did increase our military spending.

      What we ARE concerned about is China and recent Chinese movement in the pacific region. We need a LOT more funding for our navy, I would like to see DDG(X) and SSN(X) development fast-tracked and LARGE production orders firmed up now (I don't want them to do piecemeal orders of 1-2 boats at a time over 25+ years) instead of waiting years and years.

      In the short term, I'd argue we should move more Atlantic fleet assets over to the pacific as the pacific fleet is already getting run ragged with their current load.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Navy
        lmao this idiot would field horses in ww2

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Black person, the modern navy is standoff missile spam and mobile air bases.

          Focus on the naval surface fleet and naval air force.

          Navy's NGAD F/A-XX fighter should be fast-tracked along with the DDG(X)/SSN(X) I mentioned in the last post.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Spoken like somebody who is mentally unstable and doesn't pay taxes. Amazing that somebody can simultaneously be this big of a fanatic and such a pussy that they won't go fight themselves.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        USGDP is is over 22 Trillion dollars. Most military spending is a tech and jobs subsidy. You're either moronic or a gopBlack person.

        Russia must be finished off for defiling /k/ and compared to the early Cold War this money is couch change. Of course you weren't alive then and know nothing.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >$800B is couch change
          Air Force welfare Black person detected

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      We could end the war in a month if we decided to give Ukraine the longest range HIMAARS and all the satellite intel they could handle. US and NATO are deliberately slow-walking this conflict to drum up demand for domestic military funding and rotate out old stocks of ammunition with fresh ones

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      wow you’re such an inspiration anon. your country thanks you for you service. perhaps you could ensure victory against the Russian orcs yourself by volunteering for Ukraine? sometimes a victory garden and going without butter isn’t enough and neither are a substitute for a nice fresh warm sack of meat for the grinder.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Obvious ridiculous falseflag post by a vatnik and people still fall for it.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I think a lot of bases would have to become ghost towns only frequented by a few contractors to keep critical things in working order.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    thats a moronic proposition because the fact the us military is as large as it is, provides the economic and political influence to fund the titanic size of the american economy, and maintain the us dollar as the reserve currency. if you're talking about fixing issues with inefficiency and problems with procurement of shitty equipment, then yeah cutting down on waste there would significantly boost the capabilities and influence of the american military, directly making it stronger

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Muh GDP
      So if socialism works why not National healthcare, affordable housing, universal basic income if government spending boost the economy?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >I will now randomly talk about socialism

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Tax the rich and close corporate tax loopholes, there is no reason we can't have 3.5% of GDP on defense AND all of those other social programs you want.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          The rich pay most of the taxes, dumbo.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            source?

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              think about it. even if a billionaire is taxed at a rate of 1% that 1% is still vastly more than what most of the country pays.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Billionaires are taxed at a rate of 0%

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Who taught you this stupidity?

                Do you know how much property most billionaires own?

                Just property taxes alone they pay a lot.

                Just owning a $10 million dollar home and you pay $100k in property taxes per year.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Who taught you this stupidity?
                Reddit and other assorted losers have made it acceptable to just make shit up if it sounds stupid enough

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Do you know how much property most billionaires own?
                Unless you own it outright you don't pay property taxes on it, you pay a mortgage and the bank pays the property taxes. Your mortgage payments can then be used as a tax deduction.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Depends on your loan/lender

                But you pay for it still, it's just included as part of your loan interest/payment

                It's not that they pay it for you

                Lenders just want to make sure there's no property tax liens on the property

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                They still pay property taxes, you moron. Just because you pay it in addition to principal and interest, doesn't mean you don't pay it. Also, of course it's deductable - you don't pay taxes on expenses. How is it possible to be this ignorant of how shit works. Embarrassing.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Use one tax to cancel out another tax, so they pay less tax overall
                >This is proof they're paying more taxes

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                You pay taxes on profit. How is it possible to be this moronic?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Not if you offset it and use unrealized gains to finance debt. No amount of throwing insults will strengthen an argument argument.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Offset it with unrealized gains
                What do you think this means?
                I deal with what you think you're talking about on a daily basis, and it's very obvious that you're just regurgitating a r*ddit talking point that you don't understand.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I'm still waiting for an argument rather than mere insults. If you know so much about this, and think I'm misinformed then correct me, if you can.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                You have no argument. You don't even know what you're talking about. What is being offset with what?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >What is being offset with what?
                We already talked about this, mortgage payments (which factor in property tax) can be used to reduce income tax.

                I gave you a chance to show you actually know what you're talking about and aren't just saying that to try to shut down an argument you can't win, but here you are just saying you know a lot so I'm wrong, then refusing to explain what you know. I'm really starting to doubt you actually know anything, and are just some terminally online loser breaking out rhetoric to feel like he won some pointless internet debate.

                Now one more time, if you actually know what you're talking about and you think I don't, explain why.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              The IRS

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Top 1% pays almost half the taxes 40%
              Top 10% pays almost 3/4 of the taxes 71%

              Those who make $87k and up pay 87% of all the taxes collected.

              Do you know the middle class barely pays for it self and the poor cost us money?

              The upper class pays for everything.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                What does this look like when you factor in payroll taxes instead of just income tax?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Fricking insane the amount of money the rich creates for america

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Are you a bot?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                now click through some of these, anon 🙂
                https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-corporation-tax-statistics

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            No shit, they're making most of the money, they should be paying a MASSIVE chunk of the taxes our country collects. Why SHOULDN'T the people benefiting the most from our capitalist society be the ones paying the most back in that society? Honestly, i'd say after a certain income point (millions of dollars per year) you should be taxed at like 70-80% for all additional income beyond that threshold. For certain UBER wealthy I could even see beyond 80% making sense.

            Just because you can leverage your billions of dollars to make dozens of billions more doesn't mean you shouldn't be heavily taxed for that luxury position you find yourself in. Be thankful you are so wealthy that you can easily afford that high of a tax rate, and know that you're bettering your country overall because of it.

            But no, instead we get wealth hoarding like it's some high-score leaderboard.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              The rich already get taxed higher rate than everyone else.

              Have you ever got a job from a poor person?

              You want the rich to have their money. Their money makes more money for everyone.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Except that during COVID their investments have been leveraged in a way that resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from lower and middle-class investments and essentially DESTROYED pensions for teachers and similar shit.

                The uber-wealthy are raping middle-class investments like stealing candy from babies and no one bats an eye because our supposed "free" market can't be manipulated like that :^)

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                The rich already get taxed higher rate than everyone else.

                Have you ever got a job from a poor person?

                You want the rich to have their money. Their money makes more money for everyone.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                And?

                Your point?

                Good for them.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                An increase in income inequality is not good.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Income inequality is better now than it was going back in history

                There has always been income inequality and it was worse back then

                But it's not good to speak of it because of the narrative ppl want to sell

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Income inequality is better now than it was going back in history
                It is much worse than it was in the 1970s.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                as government has only grown bigger.
                Weird how that works, huh?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                In what ways has government grown bigger, and how is that responsible for the increase in income inequality?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >In what ways has government grown bigger
                Budget adjusted for inflation
                how is that responsible for the increase in income inequality?
                Government contracts making the rich richer

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Democrats shutting down large portions of the country, putting small companies out of business, facilitated this transfer of wealth. Do you think rich people just robbed a bunch of banks? This is government in action.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                They love regulation as a way to bring down large corporations not realizing that large corporations are the only one with enough money to afford compliance and enough influence to shape policy.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                These are the same people who supported regulating big banks who were "too big to fail"
                >Oops, we *accidentally* made these big banks even bigger - nobody could have seen this coming!

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                How did they do that?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Frick pensions.

                Frick social security too.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Lmao, just say frick poor people and be done with it

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Yeah

                Theyre worthless

                We shouldn't hate the rich that pays for everything

                We should hate the poor that costs us money

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                How the frick do you think the poor get poor and stay poor? The system that is designed and run by the uber wealthy who leverage their power and position to maintain the status quo, or even increase their wealth proportionally to everyone else (what we are seeing right now) which long term will lead to a MASSIVE increase in the number of poor in this country.

                There are very few real paths to success in this country that don't involve wealth or social connections, or both. And even with that it still takes luck to achieve true billionaire status unless you started with it.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Ppl are poor because they're poor

                It's not because the rich took it

                It'd be like failing school

                The reason you got an F is not because other students got an A

                Rich ppl don't need to steal from the poor

                The poor have no money

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Again, the rich people have created a system where most of the wealth is concentrated in their hands, and have made a system where that wealth is HIGHLY unlikely to trickle out of that large pool of wealth in any large amount. No matter what you do or how skilled you become and jobs you might hold.
                This is by design, it could very easily be MUCH easier to move up in the income ladder, but it isn't because that would require more of the wealth to be spread out among the masses, diluting from the top. The people at the top are never going to willingly let this happen at any large scale. Sure, they'll give jobs to the poor people and industries that allow them to earn money and survive, but never enough to get enough money to invest in a way that would allow them to grow their money like the truely wealthy can.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                > There are very few real paths to success in this country that don't involve wealth or social connections, or both. And even with that it still takes luck to achieve true billionaire status unless you started with it.
                There are literally thousands of paths to success in this country. It’s incredibly easy as long as you graduate high school, don’t have children out of wedlock or before the age of 21, and work a full time job.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >There are literally thousands of paths to success in this country

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >How the frick do you think the poor get poor and stay poor
                By being stupid and undisciplined. The rich are currently grinding down the middle classes, but the worst of the poor are generally people who would suck in any society.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >poor get poor and stay poor
                Usually laziness and poor decision making, coupled with breeding more lazy and dumb people who make the same mistakes.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Yes and instead of investing a small percent more of the uber wealthy money into social programs, education, etc to break this trend, we make sure they can never escape poverty.

                Yayyyyyy

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                We’ve had a war on poverty since the 60s and more money spent on entitlements every year. Most of that actually made things worse.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Not him, but you’re right about the failures of the government to do anything right when it comes to public spending. I don’t think that’s an excuse to still spend so much on a military with taxes and not enforce taxes on high profile corporations and individuals.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                lmao bullshit, we have social programs that are designed to not work. If you need free healthcare in this country because you're poor they make it take hours of waiting on hold to talk with someone that will probably hang up on you making you wait hours more on hold just to find someone who will finally talk to you just to get your free healthcare that the government already knows you qualify for because you do your taxes every year and they know you're poor as frick but somehow you have to sign up for all these other programs yourself anyway and wade through all of their bureaucratic shit where if you fill something out wrong, miss a deadline, or any number of other things that could go wrong, you have to start all over and could even be ineligible for whatever program it is for months or years, depending on what it is.

                There is SO much about the social system in this country that is just pure broken as frick (either by design or lack of funding) that could easily be fixed if someone ACTUALLY cared to do so.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >social programs that are designed to not work
                But with even more money, they'll start working!

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                With oversight and people that ACTUALLY want those programs to work? Sure.

                We have shown it can be done in other countries without any real massive issues. The US is somehow incapable of it because of bad actors who purposefully get themselves in positions of power to destroy the government from within, and the wealthy that do their best to lobby state/local and federal politicians to bow to their whims.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                No those programs were designed to function by people who truly believed that they would be useful. But you have to say that in order to explain why the next program will be different. Unfortunately they ran into the difficulties presented by the real world. The idea that you could just fix poverty if only the will was there is naïve.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Lmao bullshit, then how come those same programs MAGICALLY start working once they get put in a country that doesn't hate poor people (Black folk/spics in the US)?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Please show me on a map the nation that has ended poverty.
                >inb4 unironic posts of Western Europe or the Nordics

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                nah, some white christian holier than thou moron gets put in charge by the local republican political monkey and somehow the social program that was meant to help poor people only helps poor white Christians the person in charge happens to feel sorry for and have the most direct connection to. The blacks and gays and other less well liked of the local community get caught up in weird paperwork SNAFUs and other computer glitches that just happens at the worst timing for those people in particular.

                The system is just a big racist joke.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Give me one real life example of this silly fantasy

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                It's systemic, ingrained so much that even the people working at these social service programs likely subconsciously do it to a certain degree. Of course, the white Christian lady who needs help deserves the benefit of the doubt and a little helping hand with prioritizing her paperwork or making sure she doesn't fall through the cracks. But the 10th black single mother that's been in today with another sob story about her baby daddy not showing up for the last few weeks and you're suddenly less inclined to make sure their paperwork goes through or that they don't get forgotten about.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >the 10th black single mother that's been in today with another sob story about her baby daddy not showing up
                Could these peoples’ choices have anything to do with their situation?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I personally don't think it matters, but even if that is the case, how exactly are you going to judge that? If someone shows up who is TRULY in need and has done nothing to deserve that position, are you going to help them then or are you going to say you'd rather innocents be forced to suffer because SOME poor people are poor from their own bad decisions?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >I personally don't think it matters
                And that’s why your programs will never succeed. If you make no distinction between productive and counterproductive behaviors you’ll just incentivize ineffectiveness. Any gains you do make will be frittered away.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                No I just think the cost of paying for poor people's mistakes is negligible in the grand scheme of things in this country.

                I'd rather pay for women to have early abortions than to pay for that kid in the foster system for the next 16-18 years.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >No I just think the cost of paying for poor people's mistakes is negligible in the grand scheme of things in this country.
                If by negligible you mean over $1 trillion a year and the majority of the government’s budget.
                >I'd rather pay for women to have early abortions than to pay for that kid in the foster system for the next 16-18 years.
                How about we incentivize neither.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                We don't spend a trillion on abortion lol.

                For that matter, we don't spend a trillion on any group other than the elderly. If you look at a breakdown of federal spending, it's almost exclusively old people and the military.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                We spend a trillion on welfare. Although I’m surprised your solution to poverty is to eugenics it out of existence.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Do we? I'm pretty sure you could take every single government program other than social security, medicare, medicaid, and the DoD and still come up with less than a trillion a year.

                Also eugenics is based.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >social security, medicare, medicaid
                Are welfare programs.
                >eugenics is based
                If you want them dead or gone why pay anything for their well-being?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Two out of the three are welfare programs for the elderly, and the third one is a health care program, not food stamps.

                The expenditures you're talking about are poor boomers, not fat black people. If you're arguing we spend too much money on boomers, I agree with you.

                >If you want them dead or gone why pay anything for their well-being?

                We should either abort people before they're born and can feel anything, or try everything in our power to get them into a productive, happy life so they don't cause problems. Having people who are alive but causing trouble is the half measure that we don't want.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Two out of the three are welfare programs for the elderly, and the third one is a health care program, not food stamps.
                They’re all welfare. Welfare is more than food stamps.
                > The expenditures you're talking about are poor boomers, not fat black people. If you're arguing we spend too much money on boomers, I agree with you.
                We spend too much on both.
                > We should either abort people before they're born and can feel anything, or try everything in our power to get them into a productive, happy life so they don't cause problems. Having people who are alive but causing trouble is the half measure that we don't want.
                Then how about instead of dropping another load of cash on them to be pointlessly wasted away we stop incentivizing destructive behavior.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >If you're arguing we spend too much money on boomers, I agree with you.
                That's a miserly thing to say, my parents are boomers and they're good people who have worked hard their whole lives even if they're financially moronic and planned poorly for their retirement. That sentiment seems really at odds with your last paragraph.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                The cold, harsh reality is that old people are at the end of their lives. They have nothing left to give to society. A dollar spent on them is guaranteed to be wasted.

                America spends all of our money on people who simply can not give back, and then we wonder why we have low birth rates and a dysfunctional society. If we were smart, we'd be spending that money encouraging young, middle class people to have kids so we don't import half of central America.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >If we were smart, we'd be spending that money encouraging young, middle class people to have kids
                Many states have tried numerous policies to reverse modern post industrial low fertility rates, but nothing has seemed to work. I don't really think it's as simple as that.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                There are a lot of really obvious ones that we don't do because they would harm boomers financially in some way

                >deregulate zoning so housing supply can meet demand and young people can buy and own homes
                >implement government paid maternity leave (both cheaper and much, much better for society than pensions for the elderly)
                >refuse federal funding to any university that raises tuition, repeat tuition freeze until college is actually affordable
                >just straight pay middle class white people to have kids

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Sorry maybe I was unclear, when I said state I meant countries not US states. Your solutions have all been tried. Houses are extremely affordable in Japan where they're not even considered commodities, yet they have infamously low birth rates. In Sweden you are given 480 days of paid leave per child, which can be divided between parents in whatever way you wish, so both can just completely stop working for 240 days and the government will pay their salary. It has not helped to increase their low birth rate. They also have extremely high subsidies on day care, so parents don't have to pay out of pocket for that either. It hasn't helped. In most European countries and Canada college tuition is either a few thousand dollars a year or completely nothing. That hasn't changed birth rates. Many countries offer huge tax incentives for having children, but that's done nothing either. Additionally in many former Soviet states women are given medals for having many children, which has not helped either lol.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Houses are extremely affordable in Japan where they're not even considered commodities, yet they have infamously low birth rates

                That's because they have terrible work hours and bad wages.

                America doesn't. If you combine Japanese housing prices with American buying power, you'd have an enormous amount of people entering the middle class. Hence why this exact thing is happening in sun belt cities that aren't being smothered to death by NIMBYs.

                Also, Sweden has a higher birth rate than us, dumbass.

                The problem isn’t so much empty housing is it is that housing in most metropolitan areas is increasingly difficult to build for regulatory reasons as a result of nimby.

                I think it needs to be a combination of

                >Japan style zoning laws and public transit investment
                >taxes on empty homes
                >tax incentives for developers

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Sweden has a higher birth rate than us, dumbass.
                I see you haven't looked at which swedes are having kids. Hint: it's not the white ones.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                What does it matter if the kids aren't white? A more robust population boosts our GDP

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                LOL. Yeah, who cares if sweden turns into afghanistan at least they have a good GDP!

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Houses in Japan are also fricking worthless after twenty years because they're built with a 50 year life span max.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                A blessing in disguise because it means they don't use them as investments.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Giving medals to women for having kids obviously isn't going to do shit.

                All else equal, the daycare and paid leave do help, they just don't move the ball much. Recessions have had a very large impact on birth rates, always have, see Depression era birth rates.

                The problem is that cheap day cars and time off don't get you into the middle class. Increasingly, you're either part of the top or you live in shit. Better benefits might make women more likely to have kids, but they can't start having kids at 22 and have a hope of making it up unless they have a husband who already made it or come from a wealthy family. Having 24 months off to take care of kids over the course of 4-5 years will absolutely tank you if you are new college graduate #128283. You'll be worse off than your 22 year old self for getting a job at 28 and have more responsibilities to juggle.

                This is true, but less so for men too. You can't grind out extra hours to make it up to the pool of young management talent if you have to go pick up your kids.

                People didn't care as much before, but that's because your CEOs were making 5-7 times what the average guy did, not 50-450 times as much, and slipping into what looks to be a permanent underclass wasn't a thing people had to worry about.

                Anyhow, we don't need more people. The world is packed. We just need less retirees.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Millennials aren't having kids because they don't have money. Less taxes equals more money.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Millennials aren't having kids because they don't have money
                Hassidic israelites refute this point. They frick themselves into poverty and just keep having kids. It's not just a matter of money.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                True, so do Black folks and messicans. Whites are just soft from living too well for too long, and don't want to sacrifice their living standard. Ultimately, more money likely would incentivise whites to have kids, though.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Social security isn't a welfare program, your monthly allocation is based on what you paid into it when you were working. Higher earners and people who didn't leave the workforce to have children will be paid out more. If you didn't work for at least 11 years you won't even be eligible for anything.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                It is a welfare program. The program is redistributive with the lower income bracket getting a better return rate. It could also be argued that it’s a wealth transfer from the young to the elderly in the current configuration.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Even so, I wouldn't really consider it an entitlement.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Social Security paid out more than the average retiree put into it for the first cohort that worked throughout its existence.

                You can compare everything a generation paid in, and what they would have earned on that at the risk free rate of return (T bills) to what they got paid out on average.

                The first generation earned basically 8% on their savings. Boomers will do worse, but are still making out at 5%. They are getting more back than what they put in if that money had just gone to safe bonds.

                But there have been a ton of changes to restructure, and your average person born after the mid -1980s is expected to do worse than if they had just thrown the money in a savings account. And likely the retirement age will have to be raised again, and then again. The deficit is from SS and Medicare are fricking gigantic by the end of this decade. The rest of the budget will actually naturally run a surplus, but retiree obligations will keep the deficit bulging.

                They will do what unions always do here; have younger people pay in more for less. It's all you can really do when they old people have already gotten out of the workforce and they keep growing as a share of the population.

                However, you could also tax their considerable wealth. Or, you could overrule their votes and allow housing to be built. A big part of their wealth comes from voting for decades of mass migration but refusing to let housing get built. Higher demand, static supply.

                Push will come to shove though, and we can't have a country where the elderly hold 50+% of the wealth but then 60% of the budget goes directly to cash payments of services for them.

                The healthcare costs alone show we have to do reform at some point. We can't afford private rates for all the Boomers.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >you could also tax their considerable wealth
                This is happening right now. You will pay taxes on shit you inherit when your parents croak.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I would love it if more housing was allowed to be built in cities. Particularly high rise apartments. The healthcare system needs to be de regulated heavily. The growing costs have less to do with physician salaries, equipment, or drugs and more to do with ballooning admin costs. Also the huge amount spent preventable conditions as a result of obesity.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Just implement a fat tax and an empty housing tax.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                The problem isn’t so much empty housing is it is that housing in most metropolitan areas is increasingly difficult to build for regulatory reasons as a result of nimby.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >The problem isn’t so much empty housing
                >live in big US city
                >thousands of empty condos and rentals
                >empty commercial properties everywhere
                >empty office spaces
                >empty labs
                and they are still building more of everything

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >social security, medicare, medicaid, and the DoD
                All welfare programs

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >I'd rather pay
                Do you realize that you can do that without a government mandate? Planned Parenthood takes donations.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I would rather fund them publicly than risk a single more hubcap thief being born to a hoodrat mother.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                This is the most unintentionally racist thing I've ever seen on PrepHoleg

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Ah, the specter of systematic racism rears its head. Always lurking unseen but willing to be held responsible for any policy failures or inequality of outcome.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                65% of taxes go to some kind of wealth redistribution. Go back to r*ddit where people will give you updoots for parroting moronic opinions with zero basis in reality.
                >Instead of investing a small percentage
                What do you think medicare, medicaid, social security, food stamps, section 8 housing, and the million other programs the government runs are? How many more trillions of dollars do you think are needed before your perceived problems are solved?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >There are very few real paths to success in this country that don't involve wealth
                You know what will fix that? Taxing people more.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                The people who already have that success?

                100% it will.

                If anything i'd say we should remove ALL tax burden from anyone earning less than $100k/year and move that entire tax burden to those earning more than $50M/year

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                The US already has one of the most progressive tax systems in the developed world. Your proposal would only work with massive cuts to spending.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >100% it will.
                Lol, I would just move more money into a reinsurance shelter in the caymans and tell your poor lazy self to get fukd

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                and those are some of the loopholes that could be fixed if the uber wealthy weren't allowed to gut any new IRS enforcement or FTC enforcement and funding.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Oh yeah, those things are totally getting fixed - like after the Panama Papers came out and everybody acted surprised.
                The government doesn't work for you and they never will. Stop trying to give them more power to frick you with. Slave mentality, hoping that your slave master will show you mercy if you act like enough of a good goy.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                The government is the only thing I have ANY control over, I'm never going to have a position of power over any mega-corporation.

                Voting for someone who represents me is the only power I have as someone without a vast amount of wealth or social connections to someone wealthy/powerful.

                I'm gonna fight like hell for it as best I can because there is nothing else left for me beyond that.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >I'm never going to have a position of power over any mega-corporation.
                Those corporations make a shit ton of money with government contracts. Find one company in the fortune 500 that doesn't have government contracts. You will always only get enough money out of the government to keep you from blowing up government buildings. You live in a fantasy world where politicians represent your interests.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >The uber-wealthy are raping middle-class investments
                The government is doing this for the benefit of the billionaires, and your solution is to give the government more power. You deserve to be a slave.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Oh I mean in my world we'd gut lobbying and outlaw money as legal free speech being a concept in politics.

                But obviously, that isn't happening in this America.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >If we do this, the government will magically stop working for the wealthy
                Ok guy, sounds great

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                No it'll never be perfect, but we can improve greatly from where we are right now with oversight and laws with real teeth to punish the bullshit where politicians make BANK trading political favors to corporations in return for board positions or investment opportunities and shit later.

                As it stands now we basically have almost no real oversight or enforcement. I don't understand how ACTUALLY TRYING to set and enforce laws is going to be worse than what we're doing now (essentially nothing).

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >You want the rich to have their money. Their money makes more money for everyone.
                I do not, in fact, like the taste of boot. They are neither irreplaceable nor particularly vital. Nor will they take you in their rocket/bunker/private boat if you suck their dicks hard enough.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Someone got paid to make those boots, someone got paid to sell those boots, taxes were paid to buy those boots.

                Just like their rocket/bunker/private boat.

                You want the rich to buy more boots and rockets/bunkers/private boats.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                They don't want to consume more. They already have everything they could possibly want- they don't want to consume more. They're already buying all the boots they want. And every boot being manufactured is a school teacher not being paid, an amazon worker who works full time and is on food stamps, a government contractor selling a useless device to the fed for an absurd markup.

                Poors, on the other hand, people living hand to mouth, if you give them cash they will spend it. They have no choice. Spending money is what makes the economy tick, money sitting in swiss accounts doesn't actually do anything for anyone but the owner.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                When the war comes

                I will look for you on the battlefield, commie.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                You'll have a hard time seeing around Elon's navel.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Anyways

                They can save all they want

                When they croak, govt gets to tax their money a 2nd time

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Tax the rich
          Who is "rich" and how much should they pay? This question will never be answered because the kind of moronic children who believe this shit don't actually know how anything works. homosexual.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Keep sucking off bezos, you won’t get anything for it. They don’t pay taxes and neither did trump, while the irs hounds the rest of us they’re left alone. Government tax breaks and stimulus is regularly given to corporations and the executives do nothing but take massive bonus checks paid for by your taxes while screaming about spending money on schools is socialism and is bad.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Good job not answering the question, moron.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Any of the solutions employed by the US government in the late fourties’ or fifties would be acceptable. But really I’d be satisfied with the IRS just doing it’s job.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                This is so incredibly stupid, and probably the best example of shit repeated on r*ddit making mass amounts of people far dumber. Look up effective tax rates, not marginal if you want to understand how you've been misled.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Look up trumps tax records moron

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                What am I looking for? The guy pays a shit ton in property taxes and was still in a tax loss carryforward. Maybe don't get your understanding of taxes from salon.com, goofball.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                So you're just going to say
                >muh Trump
                to falling for the marginal tax rate myth? Why are lefties so disingenuous?

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              It's always the poors who contribute nothing that whines about the rich.

              The rich pays for your welfare and health care and food stamps.

              If you dont want to show gratitude, at least stfu.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Trump didn’t pay taxes some years and other years paid less taxes than wagies do in a month. Amazon will go years without paying a dime in income taxes. I pay for their salaries, I pay for their tax breaks, I pay for their stimulus packages. I implore you to understand how much the government does to prop up corporations and banks before spewing about gratitude. Only a /misc/tard would suck off the very people ass fricking them.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                No you don't

                Taxes are just more than income taxes

                The way they avoid income taxes is by stating no income

                Do you know how to avoid declaring income?

                Like what amazon does.

                They spend it.

                They buy other companies with those profits so they dont have to claim income.

                You know what the ppl who sells them their companies do?

                They pay taxes on it.

                That's why Amazon can claim no income. They buy things like whole foods and other companies with their budget.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Do you know why companies get tax breaks? And stimulus packages?

                Do u think it's to help the rich guy?

                It's for the workers, dumbo.

                Yes it helps the rich guys.

                But the reasons govt gives tax breaks to companies and stimulus is so that company hires workers, more workers means more income, which means more taxes.

                If a company gets a tax break from say new york. They have to move their operations there and pay taxes there and so do the employees they have there.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                People incorrectly attribute the main power of corporations to their money as opposed to the thousands of voters they have.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Now that needs to be fixed.

                Govt subsidized campaigns and no campaign contributions is a start.

                But there's always a way to bribe corrupt politicians since the dawn of time.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                You misunderstand that post. The real power corporation has isn’t their campaign contributions it’s that they employ thousands of voters in a politicians district. There’s a reason there’s a factory that produces something for the F35 in every state.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                That is true too.

                Remember how the u.s. military plays congress with threats of base closures.

                Works even better than us navy promising ship names to cities and states.

                Jobs get votes.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                You don’t think corporations have taken advantage of the leverage of their work force to get more money from the government than they need? I say need because the money does not seem to turn into increased pay and benefits for most of the work force and yet the high level positions receive bonuses. With worker shortages I’ve seen a lot of people get turned down and after I grabbed a job for the summer the corporate level told the manager no one is allowed to hire anyone else, mind you the store was still understaffed, but more concerningly other stores were so understaffed they would close during the weak and at random hours because the lone managers refused to work open to close seven days a week.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I'm sure they do.

                Does that mean we want less corporations?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I’d argue in favor of more corporations via trust busting to make the American economy more competitive again instead of the government propping up corporations who push policy through lobbying and propaganda. Tyranny doesn’t stop being tyranny when it’s Mickey Mouse’s boot instead of the feds boot. The American people should have a right to a free and open market and that requires trust busting to fight mega corporations rigging things to work for their interests.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                What happened to breaking up monopolies?

                Now freaking a few companies owns everything

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Ban israelites from holding property/business and things will go back to normal

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Moron

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                its true

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                It's not, and it's also unconstitutional and wrong.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                there's nothing unconstitutional about banning psychotic foreign genocidal bigots from holding titles to american properties. that such a ban would affect foreign israelites as well as other ethnic groups is immaterial. the important thing is that the US return to a normal, sane, and correct policy of trying to block foreign influence from reaching within it's borders rather than the current policy of inviting it.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >moronic racist doesn't know what the 14th amendment is
                many such cases

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                amendments can be repealed

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                yeah and that's not going to happen

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Jews aren't American

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Anyone born in America is American.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                People like you are why the national language of the US will be Spanish in a decade kek

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Sorry snowflake. If you don't like it, leave it.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                And that's a good thing, whites have been ruining America for everyone else for too long

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >America pictured itself as successor to Roman Republic
                >Eventually speaks a Latin language
                Based.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                More israelites pay significantly more in taxes each year than you do or ever will based on income tax alone. That by itself makes them a more valuable component of functioning society than you will ever be.
                >the poorgay seethes and cries out as he tries to distinguish himself from the other filth surrounding him
                You are all just varying shades of pale and dark low income uneducated shit.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >More israelites pay significantly more in taxes
                kek

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Free markets are a fantasy which cannot exist in nature.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                yeah, but you can kind of blunt a lot of the inevitable problems by doing

                https://i.imgur.com/aaVmwJ3.png

                I’d argue in favor of more corporations via trust busting to make the American economy more competitive again instead of the government propping up corporations who push policy through lobbying and propaganda. Tyranny doesn’t stop being tyranny when it’s Mickey Mouse’s boot instead of the feds boot. The American people should have a right to a free and open market and that requires trust busting to fight mega corporations rigging things to work for their interests.

                i'd argue the closest thing to "real communism" would be a UBI system coupled with strong controls on rent-seeking and monopolies (potentially nationalizing stuff like rail and telecoms), so that small businesses become more viable and huge corporations have to still produce without rent-seeking (such as by patent/copyright abuse) to avoid being broken up and/or outcompeted - you get the baseline ability to support the survival needs of your population (encourages and enables productive activities other than working for someone else's profit just to survive), and increase the ability of new competitors to both begin operations and compete

                a lot of the biggest problem is neoliberals not comprehending that debt-financed competition isn't competition at all and essentially forces corporations to become entirely beholden to an economically parasitic finance "industry" that produces nothing and accumulates an ever-increasing ownership share in the parts of a nation that actually keep it running

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                oh, and neoliberals especially don't understand that most inflation comes from debt creation, not "mOnEy PrInTiNg" - debt creation with fractional reserve banking enables banks to essentially create money (that they own a chunk of) out of other peoples' money. usury being inherently parasitic to an economy is a problem, but it's peanuts to the money creation enabled by fractional reserves

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous
        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Tax the rich
          Who is "rich" and how much should they pay? This question will never be answered because the kind of moronic children who believe this shit don't actually know how anything works. homosexual.

          It isn't just "moronic children" who say tax the rich dumbass, it's anyone who is being honest about paying down the debt and/or funding any sort of spending increases.

          The bottom 50% of America holds just 1.2% of the nation's wealth. You're not going to get very far taxing them.

          Income isn't as skewed as wealthy distributions. Why? The big thing is returns on capital.

          Human ability by most common measures, strength, IQ, etc. follows a mostly normal distribution. Income has a distribution skewed much more towards the top because one talented person can generate a lot more for a company than many mediocre ones depending on the field. But wealth follows a power law. This is due to returns on capital, which compound small differences until they become huge.

          Without a war or other sort of crisis, wealth inequality tends to grow and grow. This is considered a bad thing by political scientists because once the wealth get control of a large majority of a nation's assets they tend to be able to shape politics so that they can't lose going forward, to the detriment of everyone else.

          Again, bottom 50%, 1.2% of wealth, top 1%, 35% of wealth. Who are you going to tax when you owe $20 trillion?

          The top 10% owns over 90% of stocks now. This is wild when you think about the extraordinary actions the government and central bank takes to keep stonks up. The 401k is absolutely devilish, it makes plebs think they are winning when the government takes action to boost their $300k in savings, when really it is making the gap between their kids and those of elites become a gaping chasm.

          There is also a huge age gap in wealth. Boomers had 21% of the countries wealth when they were Millennials' current age, along with the White House and Congress. Millennials have 5% and the first few made it to Congress just recently. Boomers kept the White House for at least 32 years. The median Boomer networth is just over half a million now thanks to the housing market.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Half the US budget is transfer payments to Boomers.

            Social security isn't a welfare program, your monthly allocation is based on what you paid into it when you were working. Higher earners and people who didn't leave the workforce to have children will be paid out more. If you didn't work for at least 11 years you won't even be eligible for anything.

            Bullshit. Social Security works by taking current worker's money and transferring it. It has always worked that way, which is fine.

            Social Security is a good idea, but we should stop and think when infrastructure is going to shit, and we make no investments in the future, while paying out trillions in cash to Boomers each year. SS and Boomer universal healthcare costs $38,000 per Boomer per year. So much for student loans forgiveness being the biggest wealth transfer in history.

            >But we paid for it!

            Uh huh, and it just so happened that during the Boomers reign we went from low debt to higher debt than during WWII? That $22 trillion is services rendered during the Boomers' lifetime that they are making their children and grand children pay. The attitude of "frick bridges and frick global warming, I'll be dead by then," is especially lovely to see.

            Of course Congress is overwhelmingly old, Biden, McConnell, Pelosi, Trump, Sanders, all 70s or 80s. The Cabinet averaged 64 under Trump. And this has real implications. You hear it in Congress when someone mentions X going wrong by 2040 and people respond by saying "ha, who cares about that!" Well, my kid graduates from high school that year so I do.

            And we just locked down our economy and schools for a year over a disease that overwhelmingly effected old people.

            It's sort of insane to have a society where retirees have 53% of the wealth. It's not stable long term. They're going to keep importing poor migrants and expecting them to be fine living at low standards and serving retirees. Meanwhile, natives still face declining life expectancy and standard of living.

            Day of the Pillow when?

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >we should stop and think when infrastructure is going to shit, and we make no investments in the future
              I mean that's literally the opposite of reality. The (stupidly named) inflation reduction act signed by Biden did exactly what you say we're not doing.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              >And we just locked down our economy and schools for a year over a disease that overwhelmingly effected old people.
              My parents may be old, but I'm glad they didn't die of covid. I was really upset about the lockdowns for a long time too until my brother brought that up to me. It really changed my perspective on the whole thing.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                This reads like AI that was taught on the redbit politics board

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I'm sorry you hate your parents. It's nice having a family that I love.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >moronic policy makes sense if we say we're doing it for our parents
                I know this gets said a lot, but you should seriously consider eating a bullet, you spineless homosexual.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >have old people who I like
                >COVID fatality rate for old people is really high
                >support anti-COVID policies as way to discourage old people death

                I'm sorry about your schizophrenia.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >schizophrenia
                Not israeli, so I'm not predisposed to the israelite brain disease

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                You should have more respect for your elders. If not for them you wouldn't even be here.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Social security is a pyramid scheme.

              Every year that passes there's less and less workers for every retiree.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                By that metric society itself is a pyramid scheme, since we need to keep increasing the number of workers forever.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                We unironically should until the universe is ours.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                And then what?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Dimension hop and conquer that

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >our dollars have an actual pyramid on them
                No way our society and therefore lives are just a pyramid scheme

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >being honest about paying down the debt
            Stopped reading right here. If, in the face of the worst inflation this country has seen in 40 years, the government can't manage to find a way to cut their spending - then they won't ever "pay down debt", and you're the one not being honest with the reality that the government will always take the route that hurts people for the benefit of their big donors. Watch a federal reserve oversight committee meeting where they openly say that they're trying to force a recession instead of cutting spending to get inflation under control.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Why would a government elected on a platform of spending more try to cut their spending?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                They won't. They know what they're doing causes inflation, but when Biden and Bernie get on TV and blame everything from Russia to corporations for inflation, and polling shows that 50% of people are stupid enough to believe them - then we have a serious issue of people voting themselves into slavery due to their own ignorance.

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              Bro, you need to read some sort of basic economics if you're going to have an opinion about this.

              Cutting spending is harder when there is high inflation. If everything costs more, why would it be easier to cut budgets? I don't know why you think record inflation would make it easier to reduce the deficit.

              Second, the Fed is raising rates, which may cause a recession, to fight inflation. Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods. Higher rates mean people borrow less. When people don't borrow as much, they spend less. Less aggregate demand leads to easing inflation, which is already happening.

              When people take out loans, it's essentially creating more money. This is called the money multiplier. The number of dollars lent out for every one dollar deposited in a financial institution has a marked effect on inflation, since obviously creating more money means more money can chase goods. The Fed is trying to raise rates and slow growth because this will reduce inflation. Recessions normally come with lower inflation, or in big ones like 2009, deflation.

              They are doing this because they can't increase supply because supply chains are all fricked from China.

              Unfortunately, higher interest rates = higher costs to near shore production in North America, so the Fed policy will likely make the supply side not get better for longer.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I'm literally an economist.
                >Everything costs more
                Good thing we're paying a shit ton to subsidize bio fuel and car chargers

                >Inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods
                No, that's just something that results in upward pricing pressure. I'm not reading any more of this drivel by someone pretending they understand economics.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >I'm literally an economist
                Prove it.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                I'm not taking a picture of my degree, even if I knew where it was - and you likely don't know what the title 'director of capital markets' means. Or you could just look into the difference between upward pricing pressure and inflation -pre 1999 definition before they israeliteed it up, ultimately giving us several names for the same thing. What you're describing is the Fed fighting inflation (using the correct definition) with policies that promote downward pricing pressure. I don't give a shit if you believe me, continue to be ignorant if that's what pleases you.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >I'm not taking a picture of my degree
                Because you can't. You're a worthless neet with no degree until proven otherwise.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                R*dditors are so fricking pathetic. Post your degree, homosexual. You can't because you're a perpetually online homosexual troony.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Ok, now let's see yours.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >Arts
                Not him, but
                l m a o

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Its a history degree. I don't regret it one bit. I studied what I'm passionate about, learned many interesting things, and wrote several papers I was proud to put my name on. Then I was able to use it to get a good job in the state civil service that I worked for a few years before resigning last year to go to law school. I tried the stem meme, it wasn't for me. You shouldn't disparage people for getting an education, only those who claim the authority that comes from education but actually aren't.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >I studied what I'm passionate about
                Oh, well if you legitimately went in for personal reasons then fair enough.
                I'm just used to seeing arts degrees as the "I WENT TO COLLEGE, RESPECT MY INTELLIGENCE!" sort of degree.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Hey, don't knock having a scrap of paper that says you're better than people who don't have one. I worked hard to get it, and being elitist is fun.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >history degree
                >state civil service that I worked for a few years before resigning last year to go to law school
                Imagine my shock that you have no understanding of economics.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                1. I already told you I have no idea where my degrees are. Kind of homosexual that you have yours up on a wall. Did your mommy frame that for you?

                2. What the frick kind of degree even is that? "Bachelor of arts" from some college nobody has ever heard of. Is that supposed to be business or general bulshittery or is that just something you pay $39 for online?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                So it's confirmed then, you have no degree. Really pathetic that you pretend otherwise.

                >history degree
                >state civil service that I worked for a few years before resigning last year to go to law school
                Imagine my shock that you have no understanding of economics.

                I'm not doctrinaire. I'm always ready to be proven wrong and learn something new. You have said my analysis is wrong yet refuse to say how. What's the point of that exactly?

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                >I'm an economist
                You mean you got a BA from some shit tier school and clearly don't know basic terms? I'll buy that.

                You literally refered to the Fed not "getting spending under control." Central banks don't have any role in fiscal policy in modern economies dumbass. That's Congress. The only "spending" the Fed does is when it buys bonds to inject liquidity into the market, which is not what it is doing now. The Fed is taking in cash, a shit ton of it, to try to slow down the lending process.

                >Aggregate demand outpacing aggregate supply and prices for goods and services rising across the economy isn't inflation, it's just upward pressure on prices!
                Fricking lol. Go pick up the text book from one of the classes you clearly slept through and find inflation in the index.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        because it has opposition from american oligarchs who want to maintain control and dominance over the structures of the american economy. national healthcare, affordable housing, and ubi are red herrings because they imply that the government that is currently being strangleholded by oligarchs, would somehow be able to efficiently manage or even care to manage any of these systems. canada has tried all three of these things and they've all fallen flat on their face because of a growing oligarchy and corrupt political class, to handle these issues the power must be taken away from centralized sources of the economy, so breaking up monopolies, controlling fiscal policy that almost entirely hits the poorest the worst, and reducing taxation of the lower and middle class. once these phases occur then it will become possible to handle larger inefficiencies in the american economy like healthcare, housing, and it will indirectly help with providing larger incomes to the lower class.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >So if socialism works why not National healthcare, affordable housing, universal basic income if government spending boost the economy?

        US trade deficit for 2021 was $859.1 billion, versus $800.67 billion U.S. dollars on its military. The USA has the trade deficit of a Greece, but the currency strength of a West Germany.

        I suppose in theory the USA could have a stronger economy if it slashed the military and Federal spending...

        ... or avoid the risk finding out if that pans out OK, and maintain the global empire. There are also the unseen knock-on effects of dismantling the empire. The US military provides employment and daily discipline for some young males who might overwise run into trouble.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >and maintain the us dollar as the reserve currency
      Nothing has put this more at risk than our current meddling in eastern Europe

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Let's spend ourself wealthy.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      This looks like Arkansas.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I drive through parts of East TN like that. Maybe it's because I'm a redneck but I actually really like that style house, I think they look neat

        >2XTNXA

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Are these people rich now that Biden is in office? Tell me all about how their quality of life has benefited.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Having been in plenty of house that look like that some times they have a frick ton of cash.

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It's sad when you think about the only way we got a national highway system was for some made-up defense fantasy.

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Virginia, both Northern and the Newport News / Hampton Roads megaport, would collapse into banditry as former glowies and former officers fight over the scraps.

    And I will laugh from my perch in the foothills.

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    When the California national guard centralized it's armor it probably saved a lot of money. The regular army would probably do something similar by region.

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Why does America even need to spend more than, say, $10 billion a year on military? There is no direct threat of invasion from Russia or China or anyone else. Keep like 20 to 30 nukes just in case, scrap all foreign bases and military aid, sell 90% of tanks, IFVs and other things to whoever wants to buy them, like Poland and Saudis, along with most aircraft and ships, save some of them to patrol East and West coast and maybe Alaska and Hawaii, that's all.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      What information do you base your estimates on, Anon?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Are you moronic?

      New York police department has a yearly budget of $10 billion.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        That's also the highest municipal police budget in the world, so maybe not the best example of something not bloated to hell.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          $10 billion is less than some third world countries spend on their military.

          The richest country in the world with 330 million people should only spend $10b on defense?

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Fewer troony dick removal surgeries

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Sterilizing lunatics is money well spent.

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    a 100bn budget is completely unrealistic. the UK has a $60bn per annum budget with the US having 5.5x the population. France's budget is about 45bn, with the US having about 5x the population, and Japan has a budget of 50 billion for 1/3rd the population.
    so a 300 billion budget for the US military is more plausible as a per capita budget on par with other developed nations like the UK, while a per capita budget on par with Japan would be even more severe.

    Furthermore, the US' land area is 40X that of the British isles, about 35 times that of Japan. Spreading that budget over the size of the US would be excessively vulnerable.
    While there's not many people who would disagree that the US' military budget is vastly disproportionate to the rest of the world, it is utterly insane to suggest that a nation the size of the US could operate even a skeleton military on a 100 billion budget - and even a 300 billion budget would result in withdrawal from overseas bases which would result in a massive power vacuum in multiple regions.

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Downsizing a bit is entirely reasonable for our peacetime military. Those bringing up Russia are foolish as it’s the perfect excuse. Send everything we aren’t using after downsizing to Ukraine so it doesn’t go to waste collecting dust and tax dollars on maintenance. We don’t need a military that can single handily clobber the entire planet at any point. Especially with our list of allies. Get them to buy up the surplus, hold up their end on defense, and spend the saved money on things like infrastructure, job production, and dare I say healthcare. Smaller army also makes it easier to adopt new toys so that I may one day see new equipment in US service that isn’t a plane.

  15. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Government spending culture can either use all of their budget or none of it. In theory it shouldn't be hard to mothball a military base but gradually policy makers start to forget why they're supporting any of this and will just let it all rot.

  16. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They would look like a somewhat bigger version of Britain and France.

    Entirely submarine based nuclear deterrent.
    Navy overall least cut branch.
    No more super carriers (they aren't economical at low numbers)
    A reduced number of either 'lightning carriers' or smaller sized STOBAR carriers.
    Nuclear attack submarines retained but cut considerably.
    much Reduced surface warships, and more frigates than Burkes.

    Massive cut to overseas bases.
    Massive cut to the USAF as a result.
    USAF now probably a mix of multirole F-15E and F-35 and possibly F-16, or militarised T-7 for ANG/air policing.
    Possible that USAF and USN air arm integrate to some degree.
    Strategic bombers big question mark, token force might be retained, probably the cheaper ones, surprisingly B-52 makes most sense.
    B-21 probably doesn't make sense without a large order number.
    Big chance they just get cut entirely.

    Army likely retains a small light air mobile expeditionary force, a division or two.
    Much reduced heavy force mostly in case Mexico gets funny ideas.
    Possible territorial defense might be entrusted more to national guard as a dedicated territorial force rather than just backup army units.
    Marines likely folded into the army as a specialised light infantry unit.

  17. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >tfw I was the only one who tried to answer the question

    Also the US Is so far away from the actual high end threats, I think the USAF might actually go all in focusing on the low end, (IE; F-16 possibly even cheaper and smaller aircraft) to focus on interception, air policing and defense.
    The USN may instead become the tip of the spear for American aviation, with a mostly F-35 combat aircraft fleet.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Considering the USAF just bought ~600 F-16V upgrade kits, i'd say they're sticking with the low-end F-16's for a long time, at least the next 15-25 years.

      USN workhorse will likely become the F-35, with NGAD F/A-XX being the higher-end and likely sparingly used fighter.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Quality post anon. Here’s your (you) anon, if only for that joker Misato.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Also the US Is so far away from the actual high end threats, I think the USAF might actually go all in focusing on the low end, (IE; F-16 possibly even cheaper and smaller aircraft)
      that is so violently moronic on many levels. suck start a shotgun.

  18. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Very simple
    Abolish DHS, HUD, ATF, DEA, and absolutely gut the Dept. of Agriculture
    Abolish the federal reserve and the income tax implement a non protectionist 2% general tariff to fund the feds
    Make banks full-reserve only issuing writ is illegal
    Pull out of the U.N, START II, and all trade agreements unilaterally
    Start funding a shit ton of nuclear projects to scare the shit out of everyone else
    and a bunch more other stuff
    ronpaul2024

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Cool it with the antisemitism

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      You want completely open borders? That doesn't seem like a very good idea.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Allowing states to patrol their own borders is the smart solution. The federal government can and will frick up absolutely everything you let them touch.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Fed bad
          >State good
          Ok, why?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            NTA but because it’s easier to build a consensus between a states population than a nations, with the people having a greater control over their representatives actions. The problem with modern politics and why it’s so polarized is everything being attempted at the federal level.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Decisions made closer to the people who are impacted by those decisions will always be better. For example, people overwhelmingly want congressmen to not be able to trade stocks based on insider information. You will never see this passed as legislation because frick you, they don't care.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      This is moronic. If you get rid of the income tax and try to run the government on tarrifs you will HAVE to end Social Security and Medicare, even if you default on the debt. If you do this you will never, ever won elections because seniors vote way more often than everyone else, especially in the primaries.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >We can't do what needs to be done because of moronic boomers and elections
        Democracy in action

  19. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Shut down Ft. Riley and Ft. Sill for starters. That’s low hanging fruit.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      What's the one in Texas where they put all of the criminals who are just on the right side of too moronic to serve?
      Let's make sure to keep that one open.

  20. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    WEAPONS

  21. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >no more BAH, everyone lives in barracks
    >cut pay
    >fire 70% of the military
    >sell off equipment to other countries
    >get rid of the VA and all other benefits, you shouldn’t continue to get paid if you aren’t even employed by the military anymore
    >cut down on luxuries such as building mcdonalds and pizza huts on foreign bases, everyone can eat military rations
    >limit dependent benefits such as tricare, or just forbid service members from getting married and having families

  22. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    sell it all as surplus to the US market. Civilians have a right to own tanks. SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED

  23. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Create an 'elite' corps. 2 divisions elite light infantry with light vehicles specifically developed for both high mobility and tough topography and airmobile. 2 Divisions mechanized infantry with double strength armored and engineer brigades. 1 security division stacked with mps, mraps, AA, radar, intel ect ect which effectively augments both the Corps headquarters and other divisions.

    50x National Guard divisions who inherit basically all equipment from our standing army and most of the men. All women and trannies fired no exceptions. Huge recruitment drive for combat tested vets that have left, and those who remain to staff and develop the new I Corp. All new equipment procurement, no pork barrel spending. Attach any necessary and competent air assets from the Air Force for force projection and attach the rest either to National Guard divisions or to the new Air Defense Force, responsible for defending US airspace exclusively. Increase salaries for I Corp and cut for national guard. Cut dept of the Navy's budget by 50%.

    MASS PRODUCE ATGMS

  24. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    $100 billion a year would be enough to fund the Air Force, which is all the US needs to begin with. Army, Navy, and especially the Marines are all obsolete and have been for decades.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      How do you fight a war overseas without a navy? On Taiwan for instance.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Why do we need to fight wars overseas? Don't other countries have militaries of their own?

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Because we should defend our democratic allies from being conquered by authoritarian imperialism.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >democratic allies
            Europe is rich enough to do that itself.
            >authoritarian imperialism
            From where? The Moon?

            • 1 year ago
              Anonymous

              From China, Beria. We were talking about Taiwan.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Taiwan isn't a democracy. It's not even a country.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Seems to have an autonomous government which acts as the de facto and de jure formal institution of power, one that holds public elections. Whatever definitions you're using for "country" and "democracy" don't seem to be very useful.

              • 1 year ago
                Anonymous

                Taiwanese are more free than us in some things.

                I saw a Taiwanese news report on how more ppl died from the vax than from covid.

                Their media actually reported.

                Now it's just 1 thing and 1 example but in that one example their media was more free than ours.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Navy is more important than air force.

      Air force doesn't have ships.

      Navy has their own planes.

      To top it off the Navy has marines and we all know 1 us marine is worth 200 us army soldiers.

      Abolish the air force and army.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        This is the correct (and constitutional) decision.

  25. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >How would the US military live on only $100 billion a year? The base closures of the 90's already leaned out the military a lot. What else could they cut?
    Current US defense budget is little under 800 billion. To get to 100 billion you would have to gut everything. We probably should start with ending US global presence. That would lead to further cuts as US Dollar would start to rapidly lose value. People that say that dollar isn't backed by metal anymore are wrong. It is backed by steel and aluminium in US Navy ships. US Navy effectively guarantees freedom of navigation on seas. That is the most important reason US dollar is global reserve currency, once countries around the world start dropping dollar as reserve currency that would likely lead to massive inflation. Probably not Zimbabwe numbers, but something that makes current inflation look like mildly amusing joke.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      We managed to invaded Iraq and Afghanistan when it was less than half of that.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Nope. Most of US military was never in Iraq or Afghanistan. Even during the wars more of US defense budget was spent in US and other parts of the world than Iraq or Afghanistan.

        >It is packaging nightmare
        Every consumer product comes packaged.

        Do you buy single ketchup bags from super market? Same shit that might be in accessory bag of MRE or handed out from fast food joints with take away meals. If you find those in supermarket, you probably buy a box 50 or 100 bags of ketchup. A bottle of ketchup will probably have way lower cost per pound. Your local McD or Burger King buys those same ketchup bags on way different scale. Whole seller that might serve most of fast food joints in the region regardless of chain those joints belong to deals with even larger volumes.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >Do you buy single ketchup bags from super market?
          Economies of scale. McDonald's makes this possible.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >Economies of scale.
            My original fricking point.
            >McDonald's makes this possible.
            I even mentioned 'em and Burger King in my previous post. Fast food joints selling take away meals are the reason why ketchup and other condiments in individual mylar bag packaging exists. If a supermarket sold individual bags to customers, it would be stupidly expensive.

  26. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    MRE are stupid. Just replaced them with items that commercially available from Walmart or just imported them from third world country like China or Indonesia. Like this awesomely delicious spaghetti that much more cheaper than stupid MRE "spaghetti".

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Any information on what the unit cost is of an MRE?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Each MRE costs the US taxpayer 20 dollars.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      MRE is expensive because it is individually wrapped item made of individually wrapped items and item sets that contain individually packaged items. It is packaging nightmare that makes it expensive when compared shit you find on supermarket shelves, that and economies of scale. Even with size US military, their economies of scale are dwarfed in front of might of Walmart and US civilians.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >It is packaging nightmare
        Every consumer product comes packaged.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Not like an mre does. It's basically this

  27. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Look at how we waste money. Not even recycling the metal.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Probably nobody will touch it because US law makes he easier to dump in waterways than to sell the scrap with end user certification.

  28. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    bases in the US are pointless. the military doesn't even defend our border. all they defend is homosexual rights and troons or something. Its unclear what their purpose or point is other than wasting massive amounts of taxpayer money on bullshit.

  29. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    All the fricking moronic specialization shit of the army.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      That's required for modern war which is incredibly complex beyond an individuals ability to master all skills, quite like society itself. This annoys morons.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        The Australian Army manages. The Marine Corps manages.
        Practically every other military manages without having a 13N Black Motivations Specialist or a 35A Radio Knob Turner-To-The-Righterer.

  30. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    does anyone else see the face

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Looks like that towlie internet meme.

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