Americans Have Spent Enough Money On A Broken Plane To Buy Every Homeless Person A Mansion

a reply to: TheConstruKctionofLight

Ah, I take it you do not live here.

Do not take the view you see here as the whole gospel. We discuss and expose and debate the worst of our society but little is said about the best it offers. I can see how one from another country could develop a very stinted and yet partially untrue perception of what living in the US is about.

Personally, I love my life as it is. I am critical of the govt because I believe they are taking us in the wrong direction. I am critical of our economy because it also is going the wrong way. I am critical of our politics because it is full of BS and criminals, true enough.

But I will also state categorically that I would not want to live anywhere else (save perhaps New Zealand lol, in a hobbit hole). I live in Dallas, TX and even those who live in other states swallow all the media and forum crap, not understanding what living in Texas is like. I love it here. Love the restaurants, love the shopping, hate the traffic, but in Dallas I can do or find whatever I want to, pretty much. Texas is about freedom. Of course there are laws, but the best example of freedom is if you want to ride a motorcycle and do not want to wear a helmet you can and will not be penalized for it. After all, the only person you threaten is yourself. Liberals would want to "protect" him from himself..

Mass protests have worked in the past. Nowadays, it's just a quick trip to martiallawville.

Personally, I'm still waiting for Ande Panov/NAZAs interstellar electromagnetic ribbon to fully envelop our little dinky corner of the Matrix just in time to turn half the population into Xmen to fight the incoming invasion of Fukushima-spawned Godzilla-like monsters.

It's real. If you survive the next wave of useless feeder roundups you may even see it happen.

The budget is probably labeled "F35 development" but i bet its a smoke screen and the money is secretly being channelled into other research and development.

It is sad that many people can't picture change without a catastrophe or a war.

What if the masses "unionized?" What if we offered a sort of amnesty to the elite responsible for all this ? What if the stated purpose of govt was the comfort, care and mass advancement of people and planet? What if there weren't borders anymore, but cultures and regions?

It seems intractable, but human needs are universal... the fighting comes from limited resources, mistrust and misunderstanding. If the resources were everyone's...

Well, it's a good pipe dream... but really, it's better than miserably wishing for war or an asteroid to reboot... if enough of us decided to, we could reboot all by ourselves.

originally posted by: TheConstruKctionofLight
a reply to: Terminal1

Nothing happens in a vacuum. Sure there may be job losses. People could be retrained or as a lot of posters have stated a lot of downstream industries and products happen because of military spending. Whats to stop the same technologies being uses more createlivly in peacful industries?

you no longer have a car industry and yet you have the worlds greatest attack aircraft..Why did the US car industry die? Oversubsidizing and lack of innovation.

Well, I am with you. Personally I'd like to see more investments in the space industry but currently war is more profitable.

I think you get the idea I was heading to though. Until the day comes where peaceful industries spring up to replace the monster of our military complex, it is all a pipe dream.

I believe it has a lot to do with how fear has been instilled to many people. There are people who actually believe we need to be spending more on "defense," which is utterly ridiculous. America has proven that even in the past it could mobilize quicker than any other country in the world. Hitler said he didn't expect the US could threaten Germany militarily until at least 1970, yet the US basically created an entire military industrial complex from scratch, extremely quickly. This could be done even faster today if our nation was truly threatened.

All of the recent wars had absolutely nothing to do with national defense. Yet despite the fact that the US has not been threatened with a realistic war since WWII, we are spending more and more on the military every year. I mentioned fear because the majority of citizens have been scared into thinking that all this is necessary to sustain their way of life, and nothing could be further from the truth. And massive standing armies are no longer necessary in today's high tech world, but let's say that a war breaks out between actual nations, and the US feels it needs to get involved. And let's say this war is not a nuclear war, but a traditional war. Okay, so the US will recruit and maybe even draft the soldiers necessary. They can be trained and mobilized quickly, while the actual standing army is mobilized beforehand. We could cut our military spending significantly yet still retain our readiness with what we have already got.

There are certain areas that would need to maintain spending, aircraft projects included, but we do NOT need to be churning out 5th generation aircraft at millions of dollars a pop, considering the majority of them will never be involved in conflict anyway. Our civilizations have progressed to the point that war is no longer inevitable. Diplomatic solutions can be reached much more easily today, mainly because of the co-dependence of varying nations. Most of the nations that could pose a serious threat to the United States are allies of the United States. China and Russia both would avoid an all out war with the US at all costs, because the costs of such a conflict will be too high. Leaders of those nations would have to worry about direct attacks on themselves in this day and age, when a missile could hit any building you are in without anyone even seeing it coming until it was too late.

So we spend more money on "defense" than any nation, yet we have little to defend ourselves from. And if the US would stop interfering with other nations, there wouldn't be so many people who hated the US to begin with, and few would be willing to attack them. Since 9/11 there has been no large-scale attack by terrorists on the United States, yet measures get more and more draconian, without any proof that these measures have helped one bit. People are allowing these things to happen because they are afraid. They believe they are in danger of being directly attacked, but this is not the case. It is not worth spending all this money to prevent something that is not going to happen anyway.

You can spend money in actual defense, but the amounts of money being spent are not necessary until a time of war. And I mean a war that the US cannot avoid. And considering there are few nations who could attack us to the point of justifying the spending of all this money, why are we doing it? We are creating more problems overseas by interfering with other nations, while we could be instead eliminating problems at home. America needs to go back to its isolationist perspective. It is impossible to be truly isolated in today's world, but we are taking things way too far. Bush invades Iraq and for what reason? There were no WMD's, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and now ISIS has been indirectly created. Someone tell me how we have protected American interests and increased our safety? It seems to me that we are making things even more dangerous. And Obama is criticized for pulling the troops out. I suppose these people think we should just become a permanent fixture in Iraq. It is impossible, and the problem was created when Hussein was eliminated. Once that occurred it did not matter when we pulled out, the results would be the same. A power vacuum was created.

So knowing what we now know, how many of you still think that all that money we spent, and all that money being spent today as a direct result of those horrendous policies, was better than spending that money at home on a problem that can actually be solved? If someone believes that then I don't know what to say to you. It just defies logic.

why dont the Air Force just buy more F22 and the Navy just buy the navalized F22 ?

i think the USAF and USN sacrificed a lot from their requirement because of the imposed design limitation caused by USMC needs..

The JSF should be joint between USAF and USN , and then the USMC and other nations who used STOVL create another design.

so many sacrifices in the F35A and F35C were made by the overall F35 design just because it is conforming to the ST/VTOL F35B requirement.

a reply to: JiggyPotamus

Regarding your very last sentence: What about the human equation is logical?

I agree with much of your assessment. I would shrink the military quite a bit, but keeping the part that can reach out and "touch" you should you need "touching". We should not need to invade other countries as things are now. We should be able to support our obligations to nations with which we have treaties that involve protection.

Think of how strong our economy would be if we were relieved of the tax burden much of the military places on us.

i'm a big stick kinda guy, i believe in the best hardware available and constantly devolving new.
i'm also a take care of your own first kinda guy, i believe U.S. citizens should come first.

i say the best way to have both is to stop giving any aid to any country, until our folks are taken care of here.
and not just handouts. first and foremost to be rid of the illegal drain from our coffers. if you can't supply proof of U.S. citizenship, short of life threatening circumstances, no freebees.

second, if it;s not a disaster, or any threat from a hostile nation to another, no free money for you.

doing just those two things there, should free up enough money to take care of every homeless U.S. citizen there is.

now as far as the administration of the funds, there would have to be strict guidelines for them.
more than i care to go into just right now. also there is no need for it to be convoluted, in a lot of things the simplest way is the best way.