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More Trump policy: Trump is promising to try to raise the military budget from the current $892 billion to about $1 trillion. Source.
In dollar terms, the US already spends more on its military than the next 8 largest spenders put together do on theirs. The US is under no existential threat from any other country barring a nuclear war. But given that the US already has a very substantial nuclear deterrent, spending $100 more billion a year on the military is unlikely to substantially improve that situation.
Trump has said for years that the military is in shambles and needs to be repaired, but I generally assumed that this was just rhetoric, red meat for his typically military-loving base. Perhaps he actually believes it.
So what we have is that Trump is 1) raising taxes on Americans (through tariffs) and then 2) spending part of the new taxes on the military.
What is the point of it? Playing to the base? A jobs program? Trump actually thinks that the Democrats wrecked the military and it needs to be fixed? He wants to militarily confront Iran, China, etc. even harder than the US already is?
This policy does not come by surprise, of course. Trump has long talked about how we need to invest more in the military. It somewhat contrasts with his "America first, other countries should pay more" type of rhetoric. The latter rhetoric holds that our satellite countries... or, to use the polite diplomatic language that the US foreign policy establishment honed during the Cold War, our "allies"... should spend more on their militaries, that we are being ripped off by subsidizing their defense. But now Trump also wants to rip off the US taxpayer by spending more on our military. For what purpose? Who knows.
Mr. Trump, I think that I am getting tired of "winning". I want to have cheaper housing, more money, and so on. I'm not interested in the US federal government using tax money to create an even bigger military stick to shake at the rest of the world, especially given how big the stick already is.
Is there a typo somewhere in your post? You said we spend $892 million on the military and Trump wants to go to $1 trillion. Elsewhere people are talking about a 10% increase in spending. But going from 900 million to 1 trillion would be way, way more than 10% to say the least. So I figure one of the numbers has to be in error here.
This is the most passive aggressive way to point out a typo I have ever seen, the online equivalent of 'bless your heart'. Everyone knows US military spending is in the high hundreds of billions, with a B.
It's not passive aggressive, and I did not in fact know that. I'm not sure why you would expect most people, let alone everyone, to have the faintest idea what US military spending is.
I can sort of understand if you didn’t think about the semantic content of what you wrote, but there’s a baseline level of general quantitative knowledge that one needs to know in order to meaningfully partake in discussions of civic importance. The all-inclusive annual cost of having an employee in a first-world country is about $50,000 - $100,000. The US military has a lot more than 15,000 active duty personnel. You don’t have to know anything about how much ships, tanks, or planes cost to know that $892 million will not come close to covering US military expenses.
Like, if you saw a headline tomorrow saying, “Trump to buy Greenland for 50 trillion dollars”, you should know immediately that that isn’t true. Even if Trump said those words, that would be orders of magnitude more than anyone has ever paid for anything ever.
I'm not sure if I agree with that, but I certainly don't agree this is one such case.
But you do need to know that the military has that many people. I certainly don't, and said as much.
Also bear in mind the context of this whole sub-thread. I never claimed to be good at estimating what the military budget is. Hell, I never claimed to be good at anything. Hydroacetalyne is the one who accused me of being passive-aggressive, on the basis that "everyone knows" the military budget is way bigger than $892m. All I'm saying here is that everyone does not know that, nor is it realistic to expect them to.
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