{"id":188885,"date":"2010-07-14T10:10:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-14T15:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/07\/14\/military-budgets\/"},"modified":"2010-07-14T10:10:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-14T15:10:00","slug":"military-budgets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/07\/14\/military-budgets\/","title":{"rendered":"Military Budgets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Matthew Yglesias comes to a <a href=\"http:\/\/yglesias.thinkprogress.org\/2010\/07\/greek-military-spending\/\">stunning realization on the military budget as juxtaposed against their financial crisis<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>The thing about military spending that I don\u2019t think is properly understood is the extent to which if it\u2019s not necessary it\u2019s truly wasteful. Building a mag-lev train from Chicago to Milwaukee would be a \u201cwaste of money\u201d but if you did it, the resulting train would still be useful to people and lead to some increased value. But a tank you don\u2019t need just does nothing. An extra brigade of soldiers consumes resources and doesn\u2019t produce anything. Of course if your tanks and soldiers produce \u201cNazis don\u2019t conquer Europe\u201d then it\u2019s valuable indeed. But if you don\u2019t need them, you <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">really<\/span> don\u2019t need them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">emphasis original<\/span>)<\/p>\n<p>Matt was talking about Greece and Turkey, but looking at the bigger picture makes one wonder why the biggest debtor in the world, the United States of America, is well served by spending nearly as much on defense as the rest of the world combined.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matthew Yglesias comes to a stunning realization on the military budget as juxtaposed against their financial crisis: The thing about military spending that I don\u2019t think is properly understood is the extent to which if it\u2019s not necessary it\u2019s truly wasteful. Building a mag-lev train from Chicago to Milwaukee would be a \u201cwaste of money\u201d &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,1006],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188885"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188885\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}