Your post makes for interesting political talking points, but there is no verity to the claims. The old tax system, before the at-risk rules and passive activity limitations (implemented in 1978 and 1986), was full of loopholes and often allowed the most clever wealthy Americans to pay no income tax because tax…

You clearly didn’t look at the federal budget because you won’t find line items for those programs in the summary. Furthermore, you’d see that we spend about $180B on benefits for veterans, and considerably more through OASDI.

The hijackings and liberation efforts are quite common, particularly this year because the Somalis are back. There has been a major hijacking at least once a month. The Somalis have already had several successful attacks, which are causing international friction. The Indians are extra bent about a particularly viscous…

I’m not sure you understand the value of goods shipped all over the world, nor how quickly global commerce can be disrupted if various shipping bottle necks in the South Pacific or Persian Gulf or even Caribbean are exploited by terrorists or pirates.

Your job for the day is to actually look at federal budgets and determine a spending pattern, rather than referencing an arcane rhetorical construct with little or no relation to the military issue.

Soviet economic pressure was the purpose for the Reagan build-up, which was coupled with crashing the price of oil to further weaken the Soviet Union. It’s not the reason military spending remained at at least 9-10% of GDP for 25 years after WWII. Even Reagan’s huge build up only took us back to 6.5% of GDP.

That’s like saying a policeman isn’t working on days where no one is shot or arrested. At the very least they are a deterrent, and in the case of the Navy, they are responsible for securing global shipping lanes.

The automobile industry is a groan-inducing bad joke told by PR employees who hate cars, I mean, units.

—

As much as I appreciate Ike, he fell victim to the facile, insalubrious economic doctrine of guns to butter. It’s not guns to butter, it’s muscle to fat, and now the US has heart disease because we convinced ourselves that manufacturing, DARPA projects, and transportation were much worse than giving away lavish…

Military spending is neither partisan because Republicans have decided they are going to let the middle class die so they don’t have to get their hands dirty reforming the worst entitlement state to ever plague a G20 nation.

The US Navy’s mission is not to annihilate civilizations with ballistic missiles. It is to secure international waters for global commerce, and to use international waters as a means of striking a foreign enemy if necessary. Carriers are floating military bases, and they probably cost less in the long run and generate…

Transferring the entire budget to the non-working is how we created our current problem. We cannot continue to dismantle the military and the manufacturing base to pay for counterproductive and excessively lavish (in some cases) social services.

We haven’t cut spending on the arts to increase military spending. We’ve cut military spending.

It doesn’t matter what other people are doing. The military is one of the few avenues for constitutional spending on the American middle class. It also has the fringe benefits of stimulating American manufacturing and technological development.

The need for national security is not a conspiracy against pot smokers and people with bad credit..

The problem is not the people themselves, it’s the military contracts which almost universally establish a cost+fixed-profit-margin approach to budgeting. Therefore, since profit margins are generally fixed, contractors can only raise their profits by raising the cost of equipment.

The United States Navy’s primary role is ensure the safe and free usage of oceanic shipping lanes, while also thwarting the exploitation of oceanic natural resources and wild life.

As a general rule, our national debt and the prolonged relative decline of the US manufacturing base and US middle class can be traced to our fateful decision to dismantle the arsenal of democracy after the hippie apocalypse during Vietnam.

The footprints are just the tip of the iceberg. The standards cannot be realistically achieved at a reasonable price so the EPA has written a long list of technological indulgences the manufacturers can use to game the system. Everything from special air conditioning refrigerant to start/stop technology. The EPA also…