Apparently Trump is seeking a 10% cut in non-defense spending and a $500 billion increase in defense spending.
These numbers are so high that I feel like this is probably some kind of bluster or a gambit to get a smaller increase by asking for a larger one.
This would raise US defense spending as a fraction of GDP to the same level as the height of the War on Terror, except with no 9/11 to motivate political will to support the increase.
A 10% cut in non-defense spending would hurt many people, including many Trump supporters, especially given that the DOGE experiment was cancelled and so one cannot expect much efficiency increase to offset the cuts.
A $500 billion defense increase makes no sense except if the US is increasing preparations to engage in a war with China. No other potential adversary even comes close to justifying such an increase. But China is not currently threatening any vital US interests other than Taiwan, and defense of Taiwan could be increased to effective levels without $500 extra billion. It is, after all, an island with rugged terrain, 24 million people, and its own military.
If a war does happen, it carries enormous risks one way or another, even with the extra budget. If a war does not happen, it is money largely wasted in that it could be spent better instead.
It would also be a huge experiment to add on top of the already ongoing tariff project, with difficult-to-predict consequences to the economy. The consequences might be hard to predict, but I feel like it's safe to say that the money could be spent in more productive ways.
The political fallout of actually getting these changes implemented, which seems like an extreme long shot, would drive everyone other than hardcore MAGA "I love the troops" types away and people who directly benefit from defense spending away from the Republican coalition and would give non-Republicans a huge amount of fodder for campaign material.
Even the fallout of just trying to get the changes implemented is bad. It is coming not long before the midterms and it is also a ready-made gift to Newsom or whoever else runs in 2028.
What is Trump doing with this?
Goodguy
1d ago
If ChatGPT is to be believed, though, the EU countries have spent slightly more on supporting Ukraine in the current war than the US has, despite having only about 70% of the US GDP. You can argue that because the US does other things around the world that benefit Europe, this is only fair, and indeed it would be even more fair if the EU had spent even more than they actually have. However, clearly the EU countries have not just been sitting around asking the US to help.
Goodguy
1d ago
Which actually is rather strange. After all, if "everyone understands" that some people are just abusive, controlling drunks, then why doesn't "everyone understand" that some people are just insanely attracted/attached to dangerous men? The latter is just as much psychological trait as the former.
Goodguy
1d ago
I think many men have adopted the whole stereotypical male ego "I'm tough and ready for anything" mentality so much that the idea that they are being abused by a woman in a relationship doesn't even occur to them. After all, they see women as weak and nonthreatening. So abuse might be happening, but they lack the cognitive symbols that would allow them to actually conceptualize it as abuse.
Goodguy
1d ago
If you are speaking from personal experience, I'd be curious to know more. Of course, I don't want to pry to the point of encouraging doxxing.
Goodguy
1d ago
It's unsurprising that some women are like this, after all human psychology is very diverse. I wouldn't necessarily say that it indicates any problem with women as a group. Even if it's true that women tend to be drawn do men like this, which I'm not sure of but is certainly possible, that doesn't mean that the average woman acts on it, at least not to the extent of your story. Men too are often drawn to volatile and dangerous women, though probably not to the same degree as women are drawn to volatile and dangerous men. The femme fatale archetype and the "hot BPD girl" archetype exist for a reason. It's just that in real life unlike in the movies, such women usually don't use the kind of physical violence that would be dangerous to the average man.
Goodguy
2d ago
I think that after the experience of the last 4 years, Russia would not risk attacking say Poland even if NATO was dissolved, and no matter how much in doubt EU unity was. There would be just too much risk of getting drawn into a direct war against the entire EU, which has 3 times Russia's population, 7 times its GDP, and two nuclear-armed countries. So while being attacked by Russia would be very painful for, say, Poland, the actual risk that Russia would decide to do something like that is very small.
Goodguy
2d ago
As a NATO member, almost certainly much more, including the entirety of NATO actively joining the conflict rather than just providing intelligence and materiel.
Goodguy
2d ago
But wasn't deal to fight the USSR together, not for Europe to support American geopolitics all over the world?
Goodguy
2d ago
Their preference for welfare over weapons can be seen as rational, since the only country they have any realistic chance of fighting a major war with in the foreseeable future is Russia, and Russia is not strong enough to seriously endanger anything more than the Baltic states. I'm not sure that the Russia of January 1, 2022 could have even conquered Poland in a 1-on-1 war, and now Russia is bogged down on another front. Essentially, the EU is already militarily strong enough to effectively deter Russia even without increasing military sizes or spending. Despite the occasional claims by EU politicians that Russia is an existential threat, the reality is that the current war in Ukraine is not an existential war for the EU, it is a war that is being fought for ideological, moral, and sphere-of-influence reasons. Even if Russia conquered all of Ukraine, it still would not have the power to existentially threaten the EU.
Goodguy
2d ago
I don't think that theory is likely to be true because:
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Not opening the Strait of Hormuz gives Iran leverage, and it seems to me from observing their utterances that the people in charge genuinely and emotionally, not just performatively, hate the Iranian government.
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Not opening the Strait of Hormuz hurts the Gulf Arab states. Keeping those states dependent on the US is geopolitically important to the US. Also, Saudi Arabia's leadership has personal connections to the Trump family.
Goodguy
3d ago
Can you provide more information about "Things are going especially bad in Israel according to some of the voices sitting behind the MSM"?
Goodguy
4d ago
At this point non-leftists have so many discussion forums that it's possible there are no longer enough non-leftists lacking a home to cause a non-censored Reddit to be swamped by them.
I think the two complications for Russia in helping Iran are as follows:
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The Russian government's actions over the course of the last decade show that it values having friendly relations with Israel and the Arab Gulf States even while having hostile relations with the United States. I don't know to what extent this policy is motivated by geopolitics and to what extent it is motivated by shady financial interests of the Russian elite. In the case of Israel, the friendly relations are also probably motivated in part by the fact that just like America, Russia has many Jewish elites, and that Israel has many Jews from a Russian background.
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Russia can ship things to Iran across the Caspian Sea without the ships being attacked. However, the US/Israel have very good surveillance and spying capacity, so they can probably accurately target that stuff as soon as gets into Iranian hands. This is similar to how things work in the Ukraine war, where the Russians don't bomb supplies while they are in NATO countries (with the possible exception of some alleged sabotage operations), but as soon as the supplies cross the border into Ukraine, Russia feels free to target them.
Goodguy
4d ago
Got it. To be fair, I did see negative consequences of wokeness. Just not in my career. I saw it in changing attitudes to police work that, I imagine, probably explain why one of the pharmacies in my neighborhood closed and another has almost every item locked up.
Goodguy
4d ago
Amadan is a self-proclaimed leftist? Are you sure? I kind of feel like I would have picked up on that after years of being here.
True. That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with? I've worked for over ten years in tech, an industry that is often considered to be a hotbed of progressive activism, and I have almost never seen it. Yes, I would get fired if I started saying ethnic slurs at the office. But I've seen almost no woke propaganda at my jobs. If I recall correctly, the closest has been some very minor but not coerced options to have custom pronouns and maybe one brief computerized inclusivity training that I think pretty much everybody just ignored and clicked through. And that's in over ten years.
Goodguy
4d ago
Oh, I agree with all that. I think that drugs should be legal but that society should strongly police things like antisocial use of public spaces. And I agree that it is good to have a conversation about the tradeoffs that both the lax or the strict approach to drugs have. I just think that the fundamental issue of individual liberty to consume substances vs. use of government force to limit individual consumption of substances is not rationally arguable.
Goodguy
4d ago
Agreed. I just saw your post as an opportunity to share some related thoughts.
I'm a socially libertarian, economically moderate, tough-on-street-crime, race realist, pro-choice but can understand where pro-life is coming from, moderate-on-immigration classical liberal.
I don't post here as much as I used to because it gets boring to argue with the same few conservatives about the same few topics over and over again.
Not only that, but many of my disagreements with conservatives boil down to matters of preference that can't really be argued about on rational grounds. For example, take the matter of whether drugs should be legal. This topic can often boil down to a question of whether individual liberty is or is not more important than the government taking steps to keep society physically and mentally healthy. But that is not an answerable question. It really is just a matter of taste, odd as that might seem.
I do still find interesting ideas here pretty regularly though.
I notice that my comments often get upvoted much more than the actual written replies to them would make it seem. Which indicates that either people here are actually pretty good at upvoting for reasons other than agreeing with the material and/or that the people who post the most on the site are not actually a representative sample of all the people who vote on the site.
Goodguy
8d ago
So much for what theory?
For Iran there are no soft targets in Israel, but Iran still feels compelled to use some weapons against Israel in order to try to establish at least a bit of deterrence to prevent Israel from feeling like it can attack Iran completely without consequence. I'm not sure this strategy actually makes sense, since Israel is willing to absorb minor casualties and economic hits, but it can at least be argued for.
Goodguy
8d ago
Residential apartment buildings are probably a bit softer than airports since it makes sense to concentrate air defense capacity on airports (easier to protect a few airports than to spread the same air defense with uniform density over all residential areas).
I don't think Iran really has any soft targets in Israel at all, it's too far away and has too good of an air defense. Some targets in the UAE are maybe what I'd call soft, but even those are pretty well defended.
Goodguy
8d ago
In theory, yes for any decent military. With Iran's limited military capabilities and its adversaries' elite military capabilities including in the field of air defense, probably not.
Yea, Trump's wins in 2016 and 2024 are of course very impressive given that he came from a non-political background and defeated many very experienced rivals, but he's never had a landslide. He narrowly beat two of the least charismatic presidential candidates that I can remember ever seeing, Hillary and Kamala. To be fair, there's a good chance he would have beat Biden if it hadn't been for COVID, but Biden also isn't exactly a Bill Clinton or an Obama level candidate in terms of charisma so I don't know if that's saying much. Right-wing populism has a solid future - after all, it's a popular response to many real issues. But the Trump form of it is vulnerable.
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