[themafia]

> There's too much group-think in the executive class.

I think this is actually the long tail of "too big to fail." It's not that they're all thinking the same way, it's that they're all no longer hedging their bets.

> we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed

We give the military far too much money in the USA.

[lotyrin]

Diversity is good for populations. If you have a tiny pool of individuals with mostly the same traits (in this case I mean things like culture, education, morality, ethics, rather than class and race - though there are obvious correlations) then you get what some other comments are describing as being effectively centralized planning with extra steps, rather than a market of competing ideas.

[PunchyHamster]

Sadly natural result of industries where economies of scale and price of entry make anyone not massive uncompetitive.

I don't think there is even a good solution for that. Govt could essentially sponsor some competition but that's easy to go from "helping to market" to "handouts for incompetent"

[makeitdouble]

> We give the military far too much money in the USA.

~ themafia, 2025

(sorry)

On a more serious note the military is sure a money burning machine, but IMHO it's only government spending, when most of the money in the US is deliberately private.

The fintech sector could be a bigger representation of a money vacuuming system benefiting statistically nobody ?

[wat10000]

It's around 3.4% GDP. That puts us in the top 10% or so worldwide, but it's not ridiculously high. It's on a similar level as countries such as Morocco and Colombia, which aren't known for excessive military spending. It's still kind of high for a country with no nearby enemies, but for the most part, US military spending is large because the US economy is large.

[themafia]

It's around 16% of the total federal budget. To be fair about 1/3 of "military spending" is actually Salaries, Medical, Housing and GI/Retirement costs.

It's also the case that none of the CIA, NSA or DHS budgets show up under the military, even though they're performing some of the same functions that would be handled by militaries in other countries.

We also have "black appropriations." So the total of the spending on surveillance and kinetic operations is often unknowable. Add to this the fact the Pentagon has never successfully performed an audit and I think people are right to be suspicious of the topline "fraction of GDP" number.

[nirav72]

Just want to point out that the NSA is part of the DoD. (Or DoW now)

[themafia]

This is true; however, their agency budget is not part of the DoD's budget and is not included in the reported "total" for DoD.

At least not in the data set I use:

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/agency

[Melatonic]

I think the number is probably much higher than we think - there is probably a ton of not so obvious spending on research and development.

[Projectiboga]

Military spending is a type of wealfare for the wealthy it is one of the only forms of public or government spending that doesn't crowd out private investors, the way public housing or publicly funded hospitals do. The high military spending and the contractor class often vote more conservative than typical for their demographic and economic peers It's been high since WW2, with maybe a slight drop in the late 70s. The current stat of "3.4 times gdp" ignores the fact that a large part of our national debt is from the military and war budgets. I saw a statistic in the mid 1990s that if we had kept our military budget at inflation adjusted levels equal to 1976 our debt would have gone to zero as early as 1994.

[wat10000]

Our national debt is from our unwillingness to raise taxes to balance the budget. Federal spending is somewhat high historically, but not absurdly so. Relative to the economy, it's at about the same level as it was in the 1980s. Measured as a percentage of GDP, the current military budget is the lowest since before the Second World War, aside from a brief period at the end of the 1990s where it was slightly lower.

Comparing budgets by adjusting for inflation doesn't make any sense. A budget that served a country of 218 million in 1976 would, when adjusted for inflation, serve a country of 218 million in 2026. Percentage of GDP is what you want to look at.

[Aerroon]

But federal spending has been historically high ever since like the New Deal.

Budget-to-GDP ratio in the US is close to 40%. (On that note, you should really consider federal + state combined rather than just federal.)

In early 1900s this same ratio was around 5-10%.

It has been increasing pretty much everywhere during the 20th century. It has made me wonder whether much of the prosperity we've seen and felt might not be a result of this ever-increasing percentage. Essentially we're spending more and more and that makes it feel like we're progressing faster than we are. Eventually it's going to have to stop though and I dread what happens when we do.

[wat10000]

The New Deal was 90+ years ago. At some point it stops being abnormally high and becomes just how things are done.

I don't see why we'd eventually have to stop this level of spending. The debt is unsustainable, but that's a policy choice to keep taxes too low for the level of spending we've chosen.

[themafia]

We nearly _doubled_ the budget during COVID. The differences are obvious:

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59946