|
|
|
|
|
|
by joshuaellinger
2167 days ago
|
|
|
Why are you comparing defense spending to a pension fund (SS)? Hardly seems appropriate. Having a bunch of old people around is expensive. Are you suggesting that we should go back to letting them starve when they get too old to work or die young because they can't afford medical care? Better comparisons are Police ($100B) and prisons ($80B) but really you should be looking at spending as a percent of GDP. Defense is about 3% of GDP. So we spend (nominally) 7% of our GDP to take care of our elderly. We spend (nominally again) 3% to police the world. No other country comes close to us in military spending but we probably make more from our empire than it costs for us to maintain it. At least so long as we don't get into too many stupid wars (cough cough Iraq). I can see what we get for SS and Medicare and I'm fine with the taxes to support it. I'd feel a lot better about the military spending if less went to crazy boondoggles like the F-22. It feels like a giant waste -- we shipped all our factories to China and none of this crazy fancy tech is going to help us if we get in a fight with them. Palantir feels like it might be another boondoggle but I've seen a bit of it at a large company I work with and it actually solves some real problems. It appears to be a slick integration of Spark and Git. It has some potential to solve problems that they haven't been able to touch in the 10 years I've been contracting for them. |
|
|