Military Spending vs Welfare/Internal Spending

Should your country be churning out bomb after bomb, whilst your countrymen lack education and starve?

Or should your country provide for everyone, until another country steamrollers in and takes everything?

Those are of course hyperbole, but which kind of funding do feel is more important? Also as in reality there has to be a balance between the funding, what kind of balance do you think would be for the best?

(Inspired by the Middle east thread due to comments about NATO and America and bombs.)

I myself feel welfare funding should be prioritised, however there should be funding for defence and a bit over for stockpiles in case of 'interesting times'.

Military first. If you want to have peace, you must be prepared for war.

Whats the point of defending yourself if your people are starving?

(what is this, Black And White 2?)

In a perfect world, we would not need to spend money on defence.

But we do not live in a perfect world. Money must be put in, to provide a competitive military force (if not the best, then it is certainly at least on par with the average), but internal spending is very important. Obviously, it is better to have bared fangs which do not shatter on clenching then it is to not have any fangs to bare, or, indeed, to have shattering teeth.

edited 29th Apr '11 4:42:49 PM by AllanAssiduity

^^ People are always starving even amongst the supposed utopias of the world. You will never end that. You can however ensure that nobody will ever come to take everything from you a la invasion.

Peace for all is more attainable than potatoes for all.

edited 29th Apr '11 4:41:53 PM by MajorTom

Both need to be balanced and streamlined, not horribly bloated and wasteful messes.

And when cutting costs, cut them sensibly. Don't make the asinine decision of constructing two new aircraft carriers while scrapping all your carrier-capable aircraft, for example.

The Soviet Union's probably the best example of what happens when you dump everything into your military budget.

edited 29th Apr '11 4:42:57 PM by pagad

@pagad: Those carriers are seven billion pounds, as I recall. Not sure if that's each, or combined.

@Major Tom: If you cannot create a utopia, that is no reason to simply abandon all pretense at helping your citizens. If I can give a reasonable amount of potatoes to 90% of the population, I think I'm not doing too badly. Even better if I can defend myself reasonably well against people with peashooters instead of potatoes.

And the Soviet Union was what I was envisioning when I think of the military spending extremes. Good thing I'm not alone in that.

edited 29th Apr '11 4:46:33 PM by AllanAssiduity

Dead people don't need to be defended. If your people aren't alive, what good does an army do?

Zombie army sounds like a great idea.

^^^ Except that route is unsustainable by all but the largest of nations resource wise. From an agricultural point of view, the US produces enough food to insure that hunger is a thing of the past if we hogged it all and didn't export a single grain. From a military perspective we have the capabilities to rapidly muster and respond to any threat.

Neither of those is cheap and doing both is not going to be cheap. We could do so only because we have the resources of practically an entire continent at our disposal. Only a small handful of places can do that. Which in turn means at the practical level, most nations will never achieve both so they have to choose, end hunger or end the possibility somebody else will flatten them and end their attempt at utopia.

Besides, even with the ability to either defend yourself in absolute or provide your citizens everything they could want, you will still not end the plagues of humanity such as the sick, the weak, the lazy and the starving. There will always be somebody who falls out of the net.

Let's put this in reference terms. The line from A New Hope where Leia says "the more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers" is not only true but perfectly descriptive of the scenario. The more you try and cast a larger and larger social safety net, the more people slip out of it into one of the categories that plagues society. Just as oppression by the Galactic Empire quashed personal freedom and the will to follow along, so to does the social safety net quash the ability to provide for oneself and choose to do so. Without social safety nets, the lazy and starving do not stick around. Either they die off or they do something to change that. With social safety nets, the lazy survive and the starving have less of a reason to change their situation for the better.

edited 29th Apr '11 4:58:39 PM by MajorTom

Military funding is the top priority, as without security you have nothing, but only to combat real threats. Anything beyond that is either wasteful, or a smokescreen by corporate fat cats to embezzle taxpayer money.

Since the second biggest military spender (China) is at $0.1 trillion, and the biggest spender that anyone with a brain could seriously imagine doing something stupid (Iran) is at $0.007 trillion, America's military budget of (difficult to pin down because of secrecy/corruption) $1-$1.4 trillion makes it rather implausible we're shooting at much more than shadows.

edit: Another thing to consider is that our closest allies in the defense of world peace, the EU, Canada, Australia, and Japan, have a combined military budget of $0.5 trillion already, enough to casually trample any “rogue state” if they felt like bothering.

edited 29th Apr '11 5:08:15 PM by EricDVH

I'm more for military spending, myself.

.....Did you just compare giving people welfare with a MURDEROUS GALACTIC EMPIRE?

And that doesn't make sense. You argue the bigger the net, the more slip out, but eschewing the net all together is somehow a better solution?

"the starving have less of a reason to change their situation for the better. "

Because EVERYONE who is starving is doing it in their own free will.

Lets go to Uganda and yell "HEY STOP STARVING AND GET A JOB YOU LAZY BASTARD" at the children there.

edited 29th Apr '11 5:02:05 PM by Thorn14

^ Did I stutter? The analogy works

For example in the wake of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, the welfare state was the absolute worst thing to happen to black America. It relegated hundreds of thousands of them to a life of poverty propped up by welfare checks. They never got the chance to succeed on their own with their newfound equality. The repercussions of that problem still resound today in the black community.

I never heard of such a thing.

Lovely. That means that I have to go die now, since I've been trying for the past two years to get a job that actually pays a living wage. Because y'know, me being lazy is the entire reason why there's a dozen people applying for each opening.

^ Get in line for dying. I've been searching for two months on dwindling cash supplies so I'm in the same boat.

edited 29th Apr '11 5:13:32 PM by MajorTom

You know people will just argue you aren't working hard enough at finding a job.

edited 29th Apr '11 5:13:27 PM by Thorn14

There's a little problem with that analogy, which is that the purpose of the Galactic Empire WAS to crush the freedom of the galaxy. Unless you're arguing that the Rebel Alliance was a more prominent effect of The Emperor than galactic tyranny, your argument is precisely backward.

Also, the OP wasn't asking which should have infinite funding, but which should have higher priority within total funding.

If the needs for security have been met, the needs for regulation have been met, the needs for reasonable safety nets have been met, and the needs of subsidies for stuff that would increase costs to society unless they're fully funded (medicine, education, childcare, local industry, trade protectionism, resource conservation, et cetera) have been met…

…Then, of course, you simply freeze government spending. Simple really.

edited 29th Apr '11 5:25:05 PM by EricDVH

It's hard to find a job when you don't have the means to find a job. I live in the middle of rural nowhere, and don't have a car. I can't afford a car until I get a better job. I can't get a better job until I have a car.

edited 29th Apr '11 5:16:14 PM by DrunkGirlfriend

So, yeah - black and white?

I'll go with gray.

A balanced budget that manages to provide sufficient welfare and essential services to the nation while also providing a strong national defense.

...now, as to what those actual monetary numbers would be, I have no idea.

To win without fighting is the epitome of skill.

Break the dichotomy. Remove the reason other people want to invade you.

Look, there are resource differences between places, inevitably. And inevitably if you have some good stuff then people will want to take your good stuff - if they can't get good stuff of their own. There's a reason prosperous, stable countries where the average folk are comfortable don't magically turn into failed states or go off invading. All warfare is a matter of logistics - the resources of food, oil, guns, and most of all the will for a people to fight.

So attack that last one in advance. Keep foreign populations developed and happy. Make trade happen so potential enemies risk losing too much by attacking you. The fact of war these days is that there are more than enough bodies - make war too expensive, and peace too profitable, and you can keep assholes off your back. And don't go for the old exploitative approaches to extracting resource wealth from a country, because you just create a war to fight 40 years down the line.

You've gotta spend on defence. But you can make defence a lot cheaper. And if you don't have your internal spending well in line, you're not going to be able to support any kind of military anyways. For internal spending, the priority is saturation over efficiency; for defence, efficiency over saturation. If you can't run your wars on the cheap, you'll go bankrupt and lose eventually anyways.

Besides, I like the thought of training all citizens in how to run part-time guerilla warfare on the cheap, kind of like the Israeli Draft as managed by the Viet Cong, and making it clear to anyone trying to take your territory that it'll become an asymmetrical warfare hellhole if they so much as try. It would be interesting to see a country that abandoned the conventional military model for this kind of preparation.

edited 29th Apr '11 6:57:23 PM by RadicalTaoist

Democratic peace theory, in other words.

The trick is to keep things small in spending, and grow as much as possible, until the threat becomes clear, and then suddenly militarise, so that you meet the threat with maximum economic resources but still have time to convert that into military power.

Right now the west is hopelessly in debt, struggling to grow, and slowly being supplanted by China. Penis waving isn't going to put Europe and America out in front, not when China is growing at ridiculous growth rates like 10 or 8%. They can buy a military later, when they've got economic dominance, and given that they're an autocracy with internal problems, then we'll all be in trouble. Just because they don't have force projection yet doesn't mean they won't get it, what, 50 years in the future? 100? By that time, the way things are going, America will be a distant second. Just how do you suppose the US got so strong? They stayed out the continental madness while we, the morons, blew a gaping hole in an entire generation and bankrupted ourselves to the point it took America getting involved just to get us out of that hole- and we still lost half of Europe to Russia.

Constant military spending and dick waving doesn't work. You only militarise when you have to militarise. You hide your strength in a golden velvet glove and then trade it in for an adamantine fist. And then, only if you absolutely need to.

edited 29th Apr '11 7:04:16 PM by GameChainsaw

With healthy amounts of economic leverage, asymmetrical warfare threats, and nonviolent resistance well applied. If you're going to be a nice guy you have to fight dirtier than the not-so-nice guys.

People still think winning wars has to do with killing people in this day and age. You have to cost people money and they'll back down.

edited 29th Apr '11 7:05:03 PM by RadicalTaoist