Why are Communism & Socialism bad?

[jaybug]

Of Tiffanys, just ick. You're willing to play Russian Roulette, just because it might work the next time?

I'd like to know why only the military gets a budget cut. Absolutely everyone else in the government needs to stay? Most of them work for government because they kept getting fired from jobs in the private sector, because they either didn't work hard enough, or continued to make poor judgements, or were just too fuckin' lazy. But yet you want to make federal regulators out of them? Brilliant!!!

[zherok]

I'd like to know why only the military gets a budget cut.

US defense spending dwarfs the next ten highest countries several times over. It's a pretty obvious place to start. Consider how fruitful many of our next generation aircraft projects have been, and how many countless billions have been spent over decades on developing planes to fight an enemy that largely doesn't exist.

Absolutely everyone else in the government needs to stay? Most of them work for government because they kept getting fired from jobs in the private sector, because they either didn't work hard enough, or continued to make poor judgements, or were just too fuckin' lazy. But yet you want to make federal regulators out of them? Brilliant!!!

I can only imagine what kind of bullshit makes you believe "most" federal workers are only there because they couldn't hack it in the private sector. I'm sure you've managed to concoct an excuse as to how it doesn't apply to the military, too.

[AceHigh]

Jaybug, following your logic the military should be completely done away with, since they are all miserable fucks who were too weak to get a job with the PMCs.

[Tiffanys]

Of Tiffanys, just ick. You're willing to play Russian Roulette, just because it might work the next time?

I'd like to know why only the military gets a budget cut. Absolutely everyone else in the government needs to stay? Most of them work for government because they kept getting fired from jobs in the private sector, because they either didn't work hard enough, or continued to make poor judgements, or were just too fuckin' lazy. But yet you want to make federal regulators out of them? Brilliant!!!

Our military budget is over double the next highest nation's military budget. Take a look at this list.

USA - 711B
China - 228B
Russia - 93.7B
UK - 57.5B
France - 50.1B
Japan - 44.7
Saudi Arabia - 58.8
India - 112
Germany - 40.4

If you add ALL of those next highest 8 combined, you only equal 685.2B.

So you tell me: Do we really need that high of a military budget? We could cut it in HALF, and STILL be higher (127B higher actually) than any other country in the world. You can try to balance the US budget yourself here. Slash the military budget in half and raise taxes only on the rich by a marginal amount and we're already in a fucking surplus. And with a few other tax changes like a carbon tax and sugary drink tax and so on we'd be in a 540B surplus.

We have a huge deficit. We can't climb out of it by just balancing the budget to 0, all that'll do is halt it from climbing. There's no sense in having such a huge military larger than any other to a ridiculous level if all it's going to do is drive our nation into poverty.

In regards to trying some failed Communist policy, I wouldn't be doing those. I already outlined the one I'd use and considering the US is practically already using it just not to such an extreme, I'm pretty sure it'd do just fine, especially if it were done without a violent coup d'état or civil war.

[vicious796]

As Ace pointed out on page 1, communism/socialism works great on the small scale when everyone has the same goal. It fails when you spread it out across millions and millions of people who have millions of different goals.

There's a reason no one has tried a large-scale democratic communist state. Think of America as an example of what that would mean. That means everyone in America would have to support the same end-goal and accept identical living arrangements, food consumption, and take-home "pay". We can't even agree on what the budget should encompass. This leads to EXTREME civil unrest because you don't have the take-home pay to comfort yourself with. You see that asshole that does 1/3 of what you do living in the same house with the same car and the same stuff.

There are plenty of democratic socialist countries in the world - most of Europe, actually. Once again, though, I don't see it working full-blown in the United States. Going "full on socialist" would mean an extreme hike in personal income tax and the absolute destruction of our current economy. Americans, at least, like the world to see if we're doing well. That's why we have some many cars per household.

[jaybug]

Jaybug, following your logic the military should be completely done away with, since they are all miserable fucks who were too weak to get a job with the PMCs.

You sir, obviously never served with men who went in during Vietnam, and never left.

We must need that high a level, as Europe can't stop having wars and genocides without US to stop them. And someone has to have a world class force capable enough to go in when you don't want those UN rapist bastards there.

But cut the US military budget that pays for US to be in Europe. I'm good with that.

And you are still only playing with numbers, not reality. Do government agencies need to go on buying sprees in September every year to "justify" their budgets for next year? They go month after month not buying shit,  and then buy crap like it's going out of style. This only leads to insane purchasing practices.

How about transitioning veterans into government agencies before they leave the military? Fill those spots so we don't have to hire someone at a normal salary.

How about Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals in every large enough US city that will treat all comers? They'll pull up stakes for national emergencies such as Sandy, and go to where needed...

And why did they stop talking about tax deductions (tax expenditures)?

[AceHigh]

Jaybug, following your logic the military should be completely done away with, since they are all miserable fucks who were too weak to get a job with the PMCs.

You sir, obviously never served with men who went in during Vietnam, and never left.

You are the one who started suggesting that private sector is so great at everything, so why being so butthurt when I use your own logic to claim that US military should be completely replaced with Blackwater?

Then bringing something as pathetic as Vietnam war up...

[xfreidax]

Didn't US fight the Vietnam war with conscripts?

[metro.]

In theory, no, they are not bad.

In practice, Communism is awful, Socialism is Scandinavia.

[Ixarku]

Didn't US fight the Vietnam war with conscripts?

And volunteers as well.  I used to work for a guy who was a Marine sniper in Vietnam.  This was a guy who described his time in Vietnam as the best time of his life, even though his career choice ruined his marriage.  The volunteer elite in any military are to be feared -- those are the guys with the dedication to their country, their people, their career, who also tend to have the best skills.
 
Every time I suggest cutting the U.S. defense budget to any of my hawkish relatives, the answer I always get is that the common soldiers and their families will be the ones to suffer as a result.

[jaybug]

Ace, I was enlisted at the same time as the ones I wrote about. They stunk, but they had been around long enough to hold rank, no matter how stupid and useless they were.

So how stupid are you Ace, to find me being butthurt when instead I was agreeing with you?

[zherok]

Every time I suggest cutting the U.S. defense budget to any of my hawkish relatives, the answer I always get is that the common soldiers and their families will be the ones to suffer as a result.

Apparently Veteran's Affairs and the R&D budget for things like the F-22 are inexorably tied together in their minds?

I guess the world is an easier place to understand when everything is seen without any hint of detail. The only way you can cut a defense budget is taking guns out of the hands of soldiers or the like.

[jaybug]

Every time I suggest cutting the U.S. defense budget to any of my hawkish relatives, the answer I always get is that the common soldiers and their families will be the ones to suffer as a result.

Apparently Veteran's Affairs and the R&D budget for things like the F-22 are inexorably tied together in their minds?

I guess the world is an easier place to understand when everything is seen without any hint of detail. The only way you can cut a defense budget is taking guns out of the hands of soldiers or the like.

Because you don't dare cut the defense contracts. Those are jobs son, j-o-b-s, jobs.

You can get the defenders cheap, but the toys cost dear.

[zherok]

What merit does a job have producing an unnecessary (and even potentially deadly to the user) device meant to fight a war that no longer is, against an opponent that no longer exists?

We continue to create defense contracts designed against a Cold War era foe, devices like the F-22 that are literally decades apart from their initial research phase (the beginnings of the plane start in 1981!) to their end point (the production models began service in 2005.) That's a long time for way things are fought to shift. And they most certainly have.

And the projects are specifically oriented in terribly inefficient ways in order to artificially boost the product's political value. Did you know the F-22 has it's production spread out across 46 states? I guarantee you that it's not the model of efficiency. It not only dramatically increases the cost, but the speed of production as well. The GAO reported the planes amount to over 2/5ths of a billion dollars each. All for a plane that we've already drastically cut down the number we're ordering, and can't export.

At what point can you say it's just not worth continuing? If we're going to pretend that the military-industrial complex is actually some huge boon to our country, let's at least have them producing things that are actually going to be used, not on devices that carry more political baggage than merit.

[Tiffanys]

lol I read about some Rangers having nightmares about bootcamp waking up relieved that they were only in Vietnam.

[surdumil]

What merit does a job have producing an unnecessary (and even potentially deadly to the user) device meant to fight a war that no longer is, against an opponent that no longer exists?

We continue to create defense contracts designed against a Cold War era foe, devices like the F-22 that are literally decades apart from their initial research phase (the beginnings of the plane start in 1981!) to their end point (the production models began service in 2005.) That's a long time for way things are fought to shift. And they most certainly have.

And the projects are specifically oriented in terribly inefficient ways in order to artificially boost the product's political value. Did you know the F-22 has it's production spread out across 46 states? I guarantee you that it's not the model of efficiency. It not only dramatically increases the cost, but the speed of production as well. The GAO reported the planes amount to over 2/5ths of a billion dollars each. All for a plane that we've already drastically cut down the number we're ordering, and can't export.

At what point can you say it's just not worth continuing? If we're going to pretend that the military-industrial complex is actually some huge boon to our country, let's at least have them producing things that are actually going to be used, not on devices that carry more political baggage than merit.

It's a shame that there isn't yet another string of businesses to intricately take apart what was intricately put together.  That would close the recycling loop, cut operating expenses to nothing, and generate many more jobs.  There's no need for the things to ever be used in warfare.  That might make the F-22 and F-35 much more economically feasible, being items that would take a long time to take apart and re-assemble, over and over.

[zherok]

I think we'd be better off with the proverbial digging holes and filling them back up, and skip the build an expensive and unnecessary plane bit entirely.

For what it's worth, production on the F-22 has stopped, with under 200 of them produced. I's pretty obvious that politics played a role in forcing as many out as they did, as impressive a device it may be.

[jaybug]

Just a guess, but I think the F-22 was to be a plane that could avoid getting shot down by MiG-29's and Su-32's when out of ammo. The F-15 could not do what those planes can do. It is not a plane to show off in stunt plane contests.

I think you also explained well why the US is so into drones now. Much less than 2/5 of a billion per unit cost. And training now consists solely of playing video games!

So,  just in case you cannot tell. I am in agreement with you here.

FYI, there are still bayonets and horses in the military. Oh, and the navy has blimps. They never let anything go, if they can at all help it.

I'd prefer if congress spelled out what, where and how much to cut from the DoD budget, than to allow the generals and admirals to cut X from the budget. Of course, congress has shown less sense than even the folks with stars on their shoulders, when it comes to reducing and/or eliminating poor programs, in and out of the DoD.

So maybe it would be good to have CPAs and active duty enlisted personnel to figure out what works, and what doesn't.

[zherok]

The Defense Secretary just recently advocated some cuts to unnecessary programs, but apparently he's too late for it to likely be taken into account.

I'm curious who decides the construction methods. I'm inclined to believe the contractor must have a considerable part in it all, given they've obviously got the biggest incentive to do things like spreading out construction of a plane to 46 states.

[jaybug]

The Defense Secretary just recently advocated some cuts to unnecessary programs, but apparently he's too late for it to likely be taken into account.

I'm curious who decides the construction methods. I'm inclined to believe the contractor must have a considerable part in it all, given they've obviously got the biggest incentive to do things like spreading out construction of a plane to 46 states.

I think it is quite similar to the theory of evolution. It changes to support further life of the organism, or weapons system as the case may be.

I think Panetta was an excellent choice for Chief Spy and Dod secretary. He's an excellent CPA, and lordy how both those houses needed, er still need a good house book cleaning. But I guess it took too much time to give a good honest answer to what does the DoD really need to have to keep US safe.

 Guess we have lots more oddments than horses and bayonets, eh?