Politicians, billionaires, the military industrial complex. Also businesses should be actively financially penalized for putting profit over people. Good luck with that though.
Billionares
Cut back on the military budget and tax everyone with more than 120 millions (random number) in assets hard.
You can’t get money circulating in the economy if it gets pooled in the hands of a selected few.
Just to add emphasis on how much we could cut from the military:
The US is ranked #1 globally in military spending, and we spend more than all of the countries ranked #2-#8 (China, Russia, Germany, India, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Ukraine) COMBINED.
Which means we either have way more shit than we need to protect ourselves, or, we’re being incredibly wasteful and need to reassess that spending.
I was expecting someone to put the numbers down. Thank you. I can never retain that part.
My personal take, as a non military expert, is that the US has too many branches, with conflicting interests, and not enough coordination and joint command, geared towards force projection and occupation, instead of a highly coordinated, intertwined, cohesive military set for threat deterrence and strategic defense operations.
In my understanding, that was the goal of NATO: having a very large number of countries combined to pool resources, know-how, means of production and, in a dire event, human resources. No country was supposed to drain it’s coffers to be capable to hold off threats.
I think a huge chunk of the US budget goes to the pay, pension, healthcare for the military personnel. I guess that’s a downside of having a huge military that is not conscripted, one that you have to actually pay. Also they have to pay them well and offer stuff like healthcare, pensions etc, to lure in people.
I have no doubt on that and that is agood thing. Those people put their lives up and risk death and injury; they deserve being taken care of.
But how much in comparison goes to funding projects that never return any results or gets diverted towards other less legitimate ends? Just the list of failed weapon systems R&D with monumental unjustifiable expenditure is huge. Plus the investment in overcomplicated weaponry with tens or hundreds of millions of cost per unit, that are found lacking when put to test by the people that will be using it routinely.
And having a volunteer army is a plus. Conscription is not something good to have. The european countries considering it are gettiing serious backlash. People want peace, not have their family die in futile wars brought about by hubris of incompetent politians.
Failed weapon system R&D costs are kind of one time thing. With military pensions and health care costs the US is paying like 700 billion $ every year. I’m not saying they shouldn’t pay that, I’m saying perhaps they should downsize a tiny bit. Maybe stop getting into wars all the time.
The thing is, for a country that attacks others, like the US, volunteer army is of course the way to go. You couldn’t do what the US is doing with a conscription army. For countries that have a military for defensive purposes, like the Finnish Defense Forces, conscription is a good thing (and for Finland, you can check the support for conscription, the majority support it and are happy to keep it).
The countries that are getting backlash from bringing conscription back are places like Germany, where people are a bit weird about that, for understandable reasons, sort of. But it does seem like they think that they might slip back into nazism at any point if they are careful, which is a bit weird if you ask me.
Anyway, Germany is not bringing conscription back because they want to go abroad and fight futile wars, they are planning on doing that because the security situation in Europe has changed, thanks mainly to russia attacking Ukraine and doing annoying hybrid warfare stuff, and also a bit because the US is being unstable, unpredictable and unreliable ally.
Hello from Portugal!
We’ve had our little forays into bringing back conscription a few years back and the sentiment was not great. Bad, to be sincere. Conscripts are viewed as essentially cannon fodder; very bad pay, poor conditions and because they have to be there, they can be abused at will. The numbers of conscious objections sky rocketed until it was replaced with voluntary service. And we want volunteer, professional, military personel. Better to have one volunteer than ten unwilling, roughly translated, is a common saying.
Back to the US.
Their weapons programs run for years and several dozens at the same time, across the four branches. It is a lot of money being spent, on a yearly basis.
You are, of course, correct that they should stop getting themselves into wars and instead keep themselves busy with internal affairs. But regardless all of the expenditure with health care and pensions, I remember reading somewhere that a great majority of the homeless population are military veterans, many of which struggle with mental conditions. Doesn’t seem they are spending what they should, how they should. We can also risk a fair degree of corruption, with some confidence.
Meanwhile, in Europe, conscription is not the way forward. Volunteer forces, well trained, well equiped, ready and capable for the kind of modern warfare the Ukrained x Russia is producing is the future. We won’t be seeing trench or open field combat as it was in the past. We’ll have operators controlling remote weapons systems for far away.
You’ve gotta raise revenues. We’ve tried cutting our way out of this, and it just doesn’t work. Thinking of “how do we reduce government spending” is fundamentally the wrong mentality; we should reduce overall spending by increasing government revenues and expenditures. If we implemented socialized healthcare, as a nation we’d save in excess of $1T even though as a state we’d spend considerably more than we do currently.
We don’t need to get rid of anything. All we need is for billionaires to pay as much taxes as the rest of us.
Cutting the military budget would help a bunch too. We don’t need to spend more than the 2nd-8th top military budgets combined.
Raise corporate taxes. They’re not hiring anyway. Wealth tax. Cut military spending. Cut subsidies.
Oh cuts? Cut off the oligarchy, push socialist policies like free dental and health care, make colleges free, re-initiate DEI programs and support, force landlords/housing associations to have a limited amount of owned homes, build more affordable homes, nationalize rail and standardize public transit and bike infrastructure, wealth cap via wealth tax, remove all barriers of immigration and emigration, support international trade, eliminate monopolies and fine them for every community they’ve affected (the money fires to local businesses and new local stores) make slap/useless law suits illegal, ban use of baseless AI, fix redrawn gerrymandered maps, tear down borders between usa, Canada and Mexico and allow free and open travel, work with Canada and Mexico with peace not segregation, de-criminalize non violent crimes, release non violent prisoners, make prisons learning/re-habitation facilities with support - not torture facilities, mandate pentagon a full and thorough Audit (including classified projects, only need to know the amount of money not what the project is), stop any and all proxy wars, heavily regulate businesses, standardize worker unions, and ensure news and news like channels are speaking true and non biased information.
That overall saves money from other spending and won’t fix the balance immediately, but will over time stabilize the economy. However good luck getting any of that situated in usa
The US military sucks about $1T a year, but twice that is spent on the most expensive healthcare system in the world. Also, Boomers are sucking more out of social security, and healthcare than they ever paid in.
All could be paid for if they stopped taxing “income” and started taxing net worth. But that would mean taxing boomers, which is not allowed. If they stopped income tax the economy would boom with trillions in spending, not hoarding.
The military budget isn’t even the whole story because it doesn’t include the hundreds of billions that go to DHS and the hundreds of billions that’s go to veterans affairs which only exists because of the military budget
Veterans affairs is almost entirely paying benefits that people earned working for the military, cutting that isn’t really an option. DHS could absolutely be downsized from being Trump’s secret police
Reduce military from 2.1m to under 500k
Audit veterans disability for fraud
The amount of people who are 100% disabled while living and working entirely normal lives says something is wrong with the system
Veterans affairs will be able to be cut within a few years
