alt Hacker NewsThe military budget is a jobs program that also keeps a (near bare minimum) level of industrial capacity afloat.
Its why no politician left or right is really interested in cutting it. If you browse open contracts, you'll see they that they overwhelmingly buy rather banal things and spend comparatively little on the "killing people" parts.
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Here's a Ken Livingstone quote from the foreword of "Drama Games: For Those Who Like To Say No":
> In the early 1980s, when the GLC (Greater London Council) was trying to save and create jobs to mitigate the impact of Thatcher's recession, we discovered that the most labour-intensive form of public spending was the arts, and so during the five years from 1981 to 1986 we increased spending on arts and recreation from £l6 million to £160 million. Virtually every actor, painter, poet, sculptor and, in particular, community artist was in work, and it made London a much more exciting city to live in. As well as taking orchestras from the Royal Festival Hall to play in the canteen at Ford's Assembly Plant in Dagenham, we particularly tried to reach disaffected youth. It's against that background that I was able to understand Chris Johnston's book. (Oh, and by the way, if you want to know which is the least labour-intensive form of public spending, it is the military.)
Maybe if we stopped pushing insane amounts of money into fossil fuels and the military industrial complex, and instead redirected it into the arts and sciences then, just maybe, we might actually end up with a happier, more employed, more fulfilled, and more equal planet.
Great. Can we change it to just be the non killing part for a few years until the bad project ideas fully die off?
The military budget is how the US enforces Bretton Woods. The jobs part is just a nice side-effect of any govt. spending.
What do you think NASA is? NASA is so expensive because it's a jobs program. There's no other reason for Boeing to have factories in so many states for building satellites.