Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
For a variety of government purposes, I probably wouldn't care all that much. For things like paying the military, it touches bad historical examples. At least part of the mess in Rome is attributable to individual generals slash political figures paying their armies effectively out of their own pocket. This not only breeds loyalty to an individual over the legitimacy of a system, but it also produced plenty of situations where the leader they were loyal to was making promises to pay them, only once they conquered some stuff and extracted loot (and political victory for the leader). It thus ties the military's individual remuneration directly to an individual political figure's political success.
IF one is not a total abolish-the-government libertarian/anarchist type and instead thinks that there is at least some value in having a democratic Constitutional system with civilian control of the military (yes, an extractive gang, but with some structure to try to align it), and CIVMIL relations that try to breed military loyalty primarily to said democratic Constitutional system rather than to the political success of individual political figures, then yeah, it's probably a good thing to have the foot soldiers be paid more by the abstract system and a formal process of the extractive gang as a whole rather than directly by particular extractive gang leaders.
We have the formal process and abstract system. Except it's broken, and being broken down further by the very same people who are now clutching the pearls about 0.05% of the military budget that is supplied as a short-term stopgap measure. Again, all the talk that this is about some high-minded principle is bullshit. It's not about "democratic Constitutional system", it's about hurting people on the ground so they lose faith in Trump and make them give money to the particular extractive gang leaders to distribute between their supporters. That's all.
I understand your perspective, but I don't see how this responded at all to my comment. You may think that the system is "broken" because your political opponents are leveraging their role in it against your preferred politician. Sure. I never contested that. I said something different, which I believe remains unaddressed.
No, it's the reverse - they are able to "leverage" it because it's broken. The whole "debt ceiling" debacle should never happen at all, let alone be happening year after year. But my main point it's not that, it's that discussing all these high-minded concepts is useless when we're dealing with a banal case of political extortion. Nobody is trying to change the basic principles under which US military operates, what Trump is doing is just trying to make people not suffer from the consequences of the brokenness of the system and its abuse. The pearl-clutchers may scream this is because he wants to turn US Army into a Pretorian guard loyal personally to him, but not only it has nothing to do with the truth, but they themselves know perfectly well it's false, they are just using it to try and fool some part of the public into putting pressure on Trump to achieve the real goal - getting the money. That's my point - considering all that as if it were a real argument about the real role of US Military is pointless, because there's no relevance for this discussion to the current events. It's all performative manipulation, not real discussion.
I think this is the main and best claim. It is likely true, in my view. That said, the context of this thread is that @MadMonzer presented an opposite view. Your response was, expressly, a "side note" on the general topic of whether it matters where/how money comes to gov't purposes. I was responding to that. It's not really responsive to my comments to just go all the way back, pre-side-note, and have your claim really be that the whole original premise is just false, anyway, as a contingent factual matter.
I'm here to talk about why people would, in general and in theory, care about the topic of your side note. Notice that your side note was not in any way connected to any contingent, on-the-ground, facts about what Trump or his political opponents are currently doing or trying to do.
Well, it is false. Moreover, as I noted, even people advancing this claim (I don't mean well-akshually-ers on internet forums, I mean politicians and media) don't really think it is true - they are just using it as a wedge to open the box with the sweet sweet budget money, and that's all. In the best case. That's like calling the opponent a Nazi - when it's done, they don't really think you are about to don the Hugo Boss uniform and invade Poland. They are just giving themselves permission to treat you like you already did. Same here - they are just giving themselves permission to treat Trump as if he already dismantled the democracy, even though he had no intent to, and they know it perfectly well - but that's not the reason to deny oneself a useful weapon!
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