Irony: Our Huge Military Is What Made Us an Empire, But Our Huge Military is What Is Bankrupting..

[girl gone mad]

Irony: Our Huge Military Is What Made Us an Empire ... But Our Huge Military is What Is Bankrupting Us, Thus DESTROYING Our Status as an Empire
George Washington, http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/07/irony-our-huge-military-is-what-made-us.html">Washington's Blog

As I've previously http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/01/military-industrial-compex-is-ruining.html">pointed out, America's military-industrial complex is ruining our economy.

And U.S. military and intelligence leaders say that the economic crisis is the biggest national security threat to the United States. See http://www.gazette.com/articles/mullen-47273-military-time.html">this, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/13/nation/na-security-threat13">this and http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE51B64820090212">this.

As RT points out, it is ironic that America's huge military spending is what made us an empire ... but our huge military is what is bankrupting us ... thus destroying our status as an empire:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX5T25dyikg

No wonder people from opposite ends of the political spectrum like Barney Frank and Ron Paul are calling for a reduction in military spending.

[hobbit709]

1. History repeats.

[Hawkowl]

9. Rome, British, USSR etc...etc...

[Ozymanithrax]

2. It is not an irony but a natural outcome...n/t

[Richardo]

3. 'Twas ever thus.

[iamjoy]

4. And The Other Irony

Or paradox, or connundrum is that military spending can also help our economy by providing well-paying jobs. You see this with members of Congress recently voting to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a second engine for the F-35 joint strike force fighter jet - which the Pentagon doesn't want. Why? Our representatives are trying to bring home the bacon to their districts.

[Warpy]

16. Military spending provides few jobs per dollar spent

while civilian spending provides most of the jobs out there.

Anybody who looks to the Pentagon as a job creation machine is looking in the wrong place.

Most jobs are created by small business.

[golfguru]

24. Wrong!

The military expenditures are tax payer money extracted from those who run outfits efficiently and make a profit -or- individuals who can hold jobs because their skills are in demand.

The military expenditures do not HAVE TO BE EFFICIENT because they are not under the strain to produce profit. That is why you have heard of $600 hammers & $800 toilet seats. When tax money is wasted it bleeds the economy of productivity.

We need military to protect us from bad people, but we do not need to act world policeman with borrowed money from China. It is sheer foolhardy and borders on insanity.

[jody]

5. IMO the cause is the NIE approved by congress for their corporatist masters. DOD's main purpose is

to protect the worldwide interests of corporatists who control our government.

Our economy is in shambles but the top one-half of one percent of our population own over fifty percent of our financial wealth, control every major multinational corporation, and are increasing their strangle hold on government of “We the People”.

Sadly those corporatists include wealthy families from other countries who have interlocking financial and corporate ties throughout the world.

IMO it's not just domestic corporatists that threaten our government of We the People but world corporatists who use US blood and capital to protect their business ventures.

Something I wrote and published in 2003.

They kept taking

First they took our steel mill jobs, and the people ignored the cries of steel mill workers.

Then they took our textile jobs, and the people ignored the cries of textile workers.

Then they took our automotive jobs, and the people ignored the cries of automotive workers.

Then they took our high-tech jobs, and the people ignored the cries of high-tech workers.

Then they bribed the people's representatives in Washington and the people ignored their loss.

And the only jobs left were in the U.S. Foreign Legion, defending the worldwide assets of those who had taken the people's jobs and stolen the people's government.

The people shouted, "We the people are dead, long live the corporation."

And the high priests of Mammon laughed about how easy it was to destroy the world's longest running, most successful experiment in democracy.

And the thirsty and hungry and sick and imprisoned and naked prayed to Mammon to have mercy on their wretched. miserable bodies because the people had lost the very soul of democracy,

"And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." (Genesis 6:6)

[mnhtnbb]

6. Yeah, but instead of reducing military spending, Congress will cut Social Security.

That's the sign of fascism.

[Fridays Child]

7. Hmm. Didn't something similar happen in recent history? I can't remember the name of the country...

...but I think the initials were U.S.S.R.

[azul]

8. Have you read Nemesis?

Chalmers Johnson:
"that the political system of the United States today, history tells us, is one of the most unstable combinations there is—that is, domestic democracy and foreign empire—that the choices are stark. A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, like the old Roman Republic, it will lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship."

http://www.democracynow.org/2007/2/27/chalmers_johnson_nemesis_the_last_days

[GeorgeGist]

10. Greed has it's downside ...

it's called Poverty.

[Odin2005]

11. History shows this was inevitable.

[bossy22]

12. except the facts get in the way of that assertion.

The truth- the percentage of our economic output spent towards defense is about 4.5%- lower than it was during most of the cold war and less than half of what we spent during vietnam (we reached i beliebe 10.1% in 1968).

The truth- over 6 million people rely off DOD expenditures to support their families. Any significant reduction in spending is going to lead to job losses- in a time like now do we really want to add another million to the unemployment rolls? I don't really think thats going to help us in reducing our deficit.

The truth- the MIC complex speech is mis-used by so many people here without understand the history behind it. Eisenhower made the speech with the knowledge that the U.S. had an over abundance of unused equipment from WWII and he was afraid that the "MIC" would convince the american public to buy weapons they did not need. But excess equipment does not last forever. We eventually used up our WWII surplus and are almost through out cold war surplus. How many more years can we expect out of a 25 year old fighter (which had a suggested lifespan of 20). Eventually we will need to replace such a fighter; the problem is that we need to replace 1200 and the time happens to be now.

The truth- the U.S. has handled larger defecits for longer and come out just fine. Yes some changes need to be made, but nothing drastic. Raising the income tax on the rich and tweaking some of our payouts are some of the few things that need to be done to get our house in order. Also, GETTING PEOPLE BACK TO WORK will also do a great deal to help.

[girl gone mad]

15. Your 4.5% number is not credible.

Operational wartime spending is separate from the general Department of Defense (DOD) budget, and is approved by congress as supplementary spending. The Iraq War, alone, will cost 3-5 Trillion dollars. If you want to count veterans affairs as military spending that is another $120+ billion that is allocated under the Department of Veterans Affairs. Spending on our nation’s nuclear arsenal is also not considered military spending. The U.S. nuclear budget falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). According to the White House, the fiscal year 2011 department of defense base budget is $548.9 billion. There is already a request placed for $159 billion for FY 2011 to cover the current wars. There is also potential for a significant increase in these requests should new conflicts erupt, or fighting get worse. Already only seven months into 2010, and there is a pending request to congress for an additional $33 billion for overseas operations.

It is plain to see that the 4% number is a complete http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10209">smokescreen.

Wars cause recession and our two wars are no exception.

PhD economist Dean Baker points out that America's massive military spending on unnecessary and unpopular wars lowers economic growth and increases unemployment:

Defense spending means that the government is pulling away resources from the uses determined by the market and instead using them to buy weapons and supplies and to pay for soldiers and other military personnel. In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs.

A few years ago, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned Global Insight, one of the leading economic modeling firms, to project the impact of a sustained increase in defense spending equal to 1.0 percentage point of GDP. This was roughly equal to the cost of the Iraq War.

Global Insight’s model projected that after 20 years the economy would be about 0.6 percentage points smaller as a result of the additional defense spending. Slower growth would imply a loss of almost 700,000 jobs compared to a situation in which defense spending had not been increased. Construction and manufacturing were especially big job losers in the projections, losing 210,000 and 90,000 jobs, respectively.

The scenario we asked Global Insight to model turned out to have vastly underestimated the increase in defense spending associated with current policy. In the most recent quarter, defense spending was equal to 5.6 percent of GDP. By comparison, before the September 11th attacks, the Congressional Budget Office projected that defense spending in 2009 would be equal to just 2.4 percent of GDP. Our post-September 11th build-up was equal to 3.2 percentage points of GDP compared to the pre-attack baseline. This means that the Global Insight projections of job loss are far too low...

The projected job loss from this increase in defense spending would be close to 2 million. In other words, the standard economic models that project job loss from efforts to stem global warming also project that the increase in defense spending since 2000 will cost the economy close to 2 million jobs in the long run.

The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst has also http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/published_study/spending_priorities_PERI.pdf">shown that non-military spending creates more jobs than military spending.

So we're running up our debt - which will eventually decrease economic growth - and creating many fewer jobs than if we spent the money on non-military purposes.

Wars are a net drain on employment.

[golfguru]

19. Except you left out the most important fact

During cold war years our national debt was a MUCH SMALLER percentage of our GDP. Now it exceeds it! Now we have Trillion dollar budget deficits as far as the eye can see. Continuing our military adventures in far away foreign lands will guarantee the demise of our country as we know it.

The Roman empire collapsed with foreign military adventure and debt. The German empire collapsed with military extension into Russia. The Soviet Union collapsed with trying to keep up with our star wars program. Lear5n from history to avoid suffering the same consequences.

[Paper Roses]

13. Yup!

[bemildred]

14. Empires have always been expensive.

And that tends to be why they collapse, when they collapse. The real concern now is that there is plenty of evidence that ours is collapsing, and it's never pretty when that happens.

[charlesb]

17. The Military is a Racket

The military and DOD are largely a massive money laundering and transfer scheme to move billions of government dollars annually from tax payers' pockets into the obscenely bulging coffers of certain major players in the corporatocracy. In other words, the ole military-industrial complex functions as just another form of corporate welfare – as well as workfare for millions of young people who can't find adequate employment in these times of "economic crisis" created by the same corporatocracy.

[golfguru]

18. Disagree and Agree

After WW II, ours was the only industrialized country left standing. The other giants, Germany & Japan lay in ruins. United Kingdom was also in war exhaustion & ruins. That made it possible for colonies such as India to break away from the British Raj. We had the benefit of fully standing factories, huge supply of natural resources and a stable government. That is what created the biggest & most powerful superpower in history. We did not have to loot and pillage other countries as every past empire has done.

But you are right in that now the military-industrial complex is killing us. Now we have immense competition from hugely bigger countries (in population) who have all the technical knowhow needed to manufacture any item. We are spending far more than our revenues. If we do not rein in our military expenditures real soon, our empire is doomed.

[Warpy]

20. We could afford an empire backed up by a massive military

back in the Cold War days before Reagan because there was a progressive income tax structure in place and both the rich and the corporate were paying for the Empire that existed mostly to serve them.

Now they've refused to cough up for 30 years and the deficit that keeps growing by leaps and bounds is the result.

If we don't manage to kick the GOP out in 2012 and overturn Reaganism, this country is finished. All that's left is selling off the highways for toll roads and the national parks for devlopment. The Chinese have money in their pockets, I'm sure they'll be willing to buy.

[Odin2005]

21. Historian AJ Toynbee called it the "Suicideness of Militarism".

[bemildred]

22. Our huge economy is what made us an empire.

And the erosion of that economy is eroding that empire. I have been perplexed for a long time by the foolishness of the US' ruling elites in eroding their own power base to get a little extra cash for private interests, but such corruption is common, so I suppose we should not be surprised.

[drew86]

23. Socialist Terrorist

I was mentioning this earlier else where and simply said we need to cut defense by at least half. Instead of having a conversation, I was called a socialist followed by the terrorist echo your sentiments.

I think we've got a real problem in this country and we've truly got to find a way to fix our problems. Obviously tax cuts and breaks are doing us no good. Unfortunately it seems that reasonable solutions are now met by ignorance and some of us, won't say what group, deem the solution as a socialist threat to undermine America.

Ultimately if we cut our defense in half, which will still leave plenty of money to remain the worlds largest and greatest military, we would truly start to see our economy turn around.

[westerebus]

25. Welcome to DU.