Inside the Pentagon

Hehe...talk to anyone who served during the Clinton era and ask them how bad of shape our military was in. Men killed in basic with faulty rifles, planes lost to maintanence short-fall, lots of military accidents, lack of training for troops. The reason we spend so much is because our military is damned huge and by that I mean by a shitload of tanks and planes, not troops, and I think a lot of the new stuff is going to all the new projects that are slated for release within the next few years (some of these have been going on well before Clinton and Bush, so these are merited).

I'm not defending Clinton or attacking Bush in particular. It's been this way for a long time and has only now gotten worse. It's been critically bad, even during Clintons time and I've said so before. Since the 70's when "Defence Facts of Life,"by Chuck Spinney, the man who has brought this all up. He's retired from the Air Force and has worked in the Pentagon and has been crusadeing for this for a long time, much of his time spent in just trying not to get ousted from his office but his superiors. He recently retired.

One of my points is for a stong and capable defence. The current atmosphere adversely affects the human cost of the defence force, the human cost of people like you, all while costing a ton of taxpayer money on things we don't know we need as opposed to the things we DO KNOW we need. I say you because you're a Marine and I belive anyone who cares about national spending, a strong national defence and/or is in the service themselves should know and IMO be very concerned about this. Defence is a part of your life.

To state again, the Clinton administration as guilty of this as the Bush administrations and Regans to boot. I would only single out GWB to say that it is worse now than it was before. It's not letting past administrations or past congressmen off the hook.

That's fair enough, especially with a looney tune like Rumsfield, our military is going in a completely wrong direction. Though I don't know who could fix this, or if anyone even has plans to.

There in lies the problem. I sence this is more of a common ground issue except for nuts who simply want to cut military spending to .5% of GDP which is drastic. The same people who wish to abolish the 2nd amendment =(

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Originally Posted by Brisco Bold

I don't want to start anything, but I really want to know why you personally believe this. Curious is all.

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I believe this because its a basic tenet of economics. See, the government is inefficient. Really inefficient. You agree, right? Not saying they are corrupt, not saying they are evil or bad or anything right now, just saying they are inefficient. I think the only really efficient part of the US government is the IRS, actually, which tells you a lot.

Anyway, so the government is unable to be as efficient with its money as a private company or individual. Given the same amount of money, the non-government entity will certainly spend it better and get more out of it than the government entity.

So the government is a bad spender. Which is why we should keep the government doing as little as possible. Bloated Socialist systems where the government is paying everything wont work, because they will waste more of their money than GenericCo will.

Here's something that discusses government spending a bit.

Also here

So that's where that belief comes. Im not saying, you know, that the government should stop spending on Medicare, should stop spending on welfare, whatever, ultimately all this is just a reality and you have to get used to it. But small governments are better.

And Tracer, yea, you're right, the DOD isnt really spending their money wisely. But as I said in the previous few paragraphs, they are part of the government, which implies they are just bad spenders.

Brisco - since you've grown up in Canada, you're probably not too aware of how monumentally bad the US government is at managing money. It's easy to see why Americans think that way after living here for a bit.

The Canadian government wastes a lot too, but it's nowhere near as awful. Heck - you see government finances argued about all the time on Canadian news, and people actually pay attention to it. Down here, the problem is so overwhelmingly out of control that everyone accepts it as a fact of life and doesn't think about it much. This thread is a totally perfect example of that - can you even imagine how much mismanagement it would take to just "lose" a trillion dollars? That's not even just spending a trillion bucks on useless crap, it's forgetting what you did with the money in first place.

I'm a pretty big fan of public health care, but having lived here for a couple of years it's really difficult to see how it would work in this country. The system is too bloated and screwed up to have it run in an efficient manner, and it's hard to imagine the end product actually being better for consumers than what's in place now. It might be possible if the state governments handled it, but that'd open a whole new can of worms.

All this is just because the country is so huge. It's like a democratic version of the Soviet Union - big and powerful but too mixed up on the inside to work properly. Elected officials just plain suck at managing stuff, and there are ten times as many of them here as there are up North. Public spending is great in smaller countries like Canada, Europe, or Japan, but in the US it ends up doing nothing more often than not.

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Originally Posted by Matt

The Canadian government wastes a lot too, but it's nowhere near as awful. Heck - you see government finances argued about all the time on Canadian news, and people actually pay attention to it. Down here, the problem is so overwhelmingly out of control that everyone accepts it as a fact of life and doesn't think about it much. This thread is a totally perfect example of that - can you even imagine how much mismanagement it would take to just "lose" a trillion dollars? That's not even just spending a trillion bucks on useless crap, it's forgetting what you did with the money in first place.

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Yeah, there's not a single excuse for loseing as much money as has been lost already. Not to mention that the government is now not even being held accountable for this loss anymore. We have a right to know where money is going no matter how ineffeciently it's being spent now and we're robbed of it. So if it's getting worse or better we won't be able to know.

Next, the reason our spending on defence is as bad as it is (I think, my personal opinion) is because heavy ties in the government to Defence contrators who only want to keep a profitable program running. The same reason why we aren't getting new, better, shuttles. It would cost the government more initially but they'll spend far less overtime and that sits not well with contractors who make tons on just the upkeep and replacement parts costing in the Billions for our current death-trap spacecraft. If there is to be a Manned Space Flight center - it should work right or not at all. NASA/JPL can do ALL of our space exploration more cheaply, effeciently, not to mention more rigorously as well as infinitly more safely. We don't need people in space if signifigant progress isn't being made and the cost to benefit ratio is as overwhelmingly poor as it is. Defence is the same way - programs, like the shuttle, are being continued and even stepped up for the sake of the program. Not for the sake of Defence.

I think the solution for a lot of our governments financial problems is to basically rebuild it from the bottom up. Thomas Jefferson said something along the lines "That our country should have a revolution every 20 years" now don't quote me on that but assuming it's non violent revolution I perfectly agree, the longer a government exists the more corrupt it's institution becomes no matter who leads it up. Do I believe President Bush is corrupt? Personally I do not, but I do think many members of the Senate and Congress are as well as other members of the government.

Haven't you been paying attention, Tracer? They caught Saddam! That means we're in good hands!

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Originally Posted by Gohron

I think the solution for a lot of our governments financial problems is to basically rebuild it from the bottom up. Thomas Jefferson said something along the lines "That our country should have a revolution every 20 years" now don't quote me on that but assuming it's non violent revolution I perfectly agree, the longer a government exists the more corrupt it's institution becomes no matter who leads it up. Do I believe President Bush is corrupt? Personally I do not, but I do think many members of the Senate and Congress are as well as other members of the government.

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I belive most everyone in Washinton has genuinely patriotic motives for what they do. I've often thought of this analogy - works really well if you've ever worked retail.

If you run a small private business like a record shop (evident if you ever go to one) everything of course is more personal. You know who works there you know your customers and you are able to work with each so that everyone is happy. No one is a number to you - but as your business grows you have more people to deal with. More Managers and often district managers and eventually you no longer interface with your emploees (at the lower store level) and instead you work with people who are there to manage certian aspects of your business. Inventory, priceing, point of sales, human resources et al. Now, more and more each employee becomes a number and each customer represents potential dollars to your bottom line. When you get so large cost of operating becomes high so you do everything it takes to maximize it - looking at all things dryly and analytically. Now your stores and your operations are numbers are part of an equation that you try to balance out. You insitute proceedures of all kinds that must be followed for the good of your business and growth. At times, your decisions and decisions of the management for a certian particular aspect of your business will not make sence to your employees at the store level - often forceing them to do things that most people can't do all the time (selling Game Informer subscriptions for instance... you stop selling alot of them and you get fired. Though they never acocunt for how many of your customers already have one and how many could actively use such a thing or how many are dead-set on not buying one. Instead your a variable not produceing a high enough value for the equation to work out as projected.). The cold and heartless business emerges. "It's just company policy," is something we hear all the time.

The govenrment is huge. Even the smallest kind of US government you can think of is larger than most any company. Politicians make laws, as represntitives of people who are numbers in their consitituency, and they do so in what they would reguard as in the best interest of the whole. They all have agendas on how to do so and often the preservation of programs and agendas are more important than the direct benefit of the people. The human cost in any large opperation is always minimalized it seems, all in favor of a program, a bill, something... things we don't vote on. We vote for people to make decisions as close as we'd like them too but we do not vote on issues directly - the problem I see is that those people do not make decisions as we would (for better or for worse). They make the kind of decisions like moving World Music to the front of the music section where Pop Rock was in a Borders so that more people will buy it (which makes no sence at all, but these things get done). In America, in almost every aspect, we are numbers to be processed in favor of an awesome income generating machine to feed the bloated pockets of the few - be they politicians, campaign financers, business owners or investors.