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[DJ]

It's about as productive as building pyramids. Sure, pyramids created a lot of work, but they didn't exactly create anything useful to the people.

Wealth (not money) is derived from labour. Labour is a limited resource. Every man-hour spent on non-productive endeavours (which are necessary to a degree) is a man-hour not spent on creating new wealth. Non-productive spending spreads the money around, true, but it doesn't create any wealth so it just means that the wealth will spread thinner.

You could argue that public works aren't directly productive either, since your average citizen will never personally use a freight train. But the thing is that better infrastructure reduces production costs, which means that the directly productive work creates more wealth per man-hour. The end result is that the total wealth is increased, and given unchanged distribution of money (wouldn't happen IRL, of course) each citizen will get more wealth.

It's basically guns vs butter. Defence spending is decidedly guns. Infrastructure spending is butter churns, since government can't make butter directly (that'd be socialism!).

[Duuvian]

It's OK if corporations do it

Although at least the government is allowing pharmaceutical research now instead of hoarding patents in order to prevent it.

[Nadaka]

Military spending isn't useless. There are many many threats to national security and having an effective and prepared standing military is the only way to mitigate some of those threats.

[ECrownofFire]

Military spending isn't useless. There are many many threats to national security and having an effective and prepared standing military is the only way to mitigate some of those threats.

Which is why we only want to cut the budget instead of removing it completely

[Dsarker]

Which gets the majority of the military budget, right? Which is obvious from America's excellent railway and highway system that makes Germany look like a 3rd world country.

...why would having anything regarding roads or the like make a country look like it was neutral in the Cold War?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Which gets the majority of the military budget, right? Which is obvious from America's excellent railway and highway system that makes Germany look like a 3rd world country.

...why would having anything regarding roads or the like make a country look like it was neutral in the Cold War?

What in the world makes you think Germany was neutral in the cold war? It spent most of it as two separate countries!

[Dsarker]

Which gets the majority of the military budget, right? Which is obvious from America's excellent railway and highway system that makes Germany look like a 3rd world country.

...why would having anything regarding roads or the like make a country look like it was neutral in the Cold War?

What in the world makes you think Germany was neutral in the cold war? It spent most of it as two separate countries!

Exactly! Half of it would be first world, the other would be second world. I don't get why anything would make Germany look third world.

[GlyphGryph]

DJ was being sarcastic. implying Germany has a much better transit system than us.

[Dsarker]

But...third world just means it was neutral in the Cold War.

[Leafsnail]

And you've made that joke, and we can laugh about it and move on now.

[Luke_Prowler]

Not all military funding goes into making weapons and tanks, there's a lot of research that is connected to the military. Just like how much technology came from NASA before people decided that eating a hole through the Earth was more important that space ships. I'm not saying it shouldn't be reduced, but it need to be a surgical removal, not just a carpet slashing

[Bauglir]

I think we can all agree that, barring deliberate villainy, whatever course is decided upon ought to be executed competently. That doesn't exactly inform us as to which course would be correct.

[Dsarker]

What about incompetent villainy?

[Phmcw]

I think we can all agree that, barring deliberate villainy, whatever course is decided upon ought to be executed competently. That doesn't exactly inform us as to which course would be correct.

Mind you it's the main problem : who to get people to do their jobs right.
If everyone is acting competently, hardly any system will fail.

And therefore a lot of policy are optimization. One could ask, for instance, if the Army is ideally suited to be the main fund for research, or the favored way to pay for one's studies. Mind you, I'd like DARPA much more if it wasn't part of the military but a civilian agency researching anything that could give an edge for the US in the future.

[GlyphGryph]

There's doing it wrong, and then there's doing the wrong thing.

Competency can only fix one of those, and can make the other significantly worse.