I agree 100%. Just leaving this here for fun. The money exists.
“WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Thursday paving the way for the defense budget to exceed $800 billion next year, authorizing $37 billion in spending on top of the record $773 billion proposed by President Joe Biden.”
USA also spends about $200B on police and prisons. DHS spends about $200B/year, some of which overlaps on that other $200B.
Good luck getting any of this or the war budget cut though.
We gotta start messaging these defense bills as $8 trillion spending bills. I doubt it will cause any cuts to happen but it will make the spending bills we want to do more palatable in the minds of the public.
BUT WE GOTTA SUPPORT THE TROOPS!
ah shit, you got me. chessmate!
what
THATS SOCIALISM!!
I suppose I should have said “on the attack” or “here to fight” since, especially in politics, attack dog has the connotation of doing someone else’s bidding and nothing else, which isn’t exactly what I meant.
I don’t think you were entirely motivated by trolling, but significantly. Whether it was primary, only you know.
If I recall correctly, Biden took the DODs request and added to it, now Congress is taking Biden’s proposal and adding to it. The exact opposite of what happens to spending proposals that actually help regular people.
Dems also still got skewered in conservative circles for this because they arent willing to close the “defense spending gap” and take us back to defense as a percent of GDP levels from like the 80s. I think we are at 3 percent or so of GDP on defense and the WSJ oped pages of the world want to cut spending elsewhere to get that back to 6 percent or so.
I should clarify that the memes and the pictures of Tucker Carlson were idiotic and out of line. Not all the responses. Also, as I said, I think the “talking points” argument is ~always bad. It’s often wrong and just an effort to create and reinforce unthoughtful or reflective group-think or, as other people who I usually disagree with often correctly describe political discussions as “echo chambers”.
isn’t this par for the course here? i was having a nice issue based discussion last week and was compared to jared kushner. i didn’t even say any conservative talking points.
re: defense spending. a lot of additional money in the budget is to prepare the branches for effects of climate change. i wish it were more about making buildings use less energy and away from fossils, but in reality it is around protecting coastal bases from seas rising. biden’s additional money is to replenish stock sent to ukraine. which is probably necessary as the prospect of nato involvement is growing with every passing month
Pretty common. Did you tell them to fuck off?
As far as war spending goes, there are lots of reasons and excuses but as long as the US is an absolutely impregnable country that spends almost as much on war as the rest of the world put together, I feel safe just saying defund. (and even beyond this point because I’m such a radical)
Microbet is here this week to fight using principled and logical arguments. He doesn’t do this every week because it’s tiring and for all I know he has personal stuff going on that makes him want to be aggressive here and blow off some steam, but it’s not complete argle bargle. Sure, he seems to have some personal animus towards CN dating back to 2p2 that I haven’t really bothered to figure out, but he’s saying things that I could predict he would say on this topic based on past posting.
It’s kind of like prisons. I don’t want someone to get into the details of why we supposedly need prisons when we put 6x as many people in prison per capita as just about any country in the world. Maybe you can imagine how the US needs war spending and prisons in theory, but the US has effed this up as bad as North Korea or 19th Century Great Britain or just about any place/time you want to insert. Quibbling about how some little aspect might be ok is, I don’t know, maybe offensive.
I know no one believes me, but I actually don’t. I think the peanut gallery unfairly piled on him over there and I didn’t take part in that. He’s quite beloved over here, can handle himself fine, doesn’t get too bent out of shape, and is fair game. And, having the people who were jackasses to him for years defend him now is amusing.
i think prisons and military are different beasts. i’m on record here saying that the us military is a gigantic social program. something like half of its budget is salaries, living expenses, healthcare, training for servicemen (past and present) and their families. cutting $100b of the DoD is going to come out of that, rather than new guns. that’s unfortunate, but like i am not in a position to audit how congress/department budgeting works. literally have to vote for a rep and two senators, maybe attend a town hall, and then watch the money go. but like, the issue is too big for any one person to grasp by themselves.
I think there is something to this analysis and the military industrial complex being a gigantic social welfare and economic boosting program and people were well aware of this after WW2 and wanted to maintain the war economy instead of going back to the pre-war economy. But, “if you build it, they will come” applies to a lot of things and the “coming” in this case is a lot of war. Southeast Asia, Central America, the Middle East.
odds he actually does 5 days?
Although he was sentenced to five days in jail, he’s already served two days and received two more days credit, Assistant DA Paul Gero told NBC News in a statement.
That leaves one more day to be served and Napa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Solga said that could be done via a court-approved work program, according to Gero.