Photo: Naval Airpower
PACIFIC OCEAN (Feb. 22, 2012) Aircraft from Carrier Air Wing 9 fly in formation during an air power demonstration for participants of a tiger cruise aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN 74). John C. Stennis is returning to homeport in Bremerton, Wash., after completing a seven-month deployment. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Benjamin Crossley)
= new reply since forum marked as read
My post was satirical. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I was hoping the excessive use of exclamation marks would do the job. 
No!
I am not in love with militarism. I am also not in love with pacifism, for what it's worth... 
...that this is just another prime example of an over-built war machine that is soaking up dollars that could be better allocated?
...keeping in mind that we have a $15 trillion dollar debt. Would you cut military spending or Medicare/Medicaid first?
Across the board spending cuts, 3% per year. No exceptions whatsoever, until the budget has been balanced.
Since this doesn't have the slightest chance of actually coming to pass, it's kind of moot.
All those PFC's will want to fight when momma and poppa can't pay their mortgage because the cost of their doctors visits skyrocketed. That's making the hard choices! 
...nothing is more crucial to our country than looking bad-ass. Gotta teach those ChiComms some respect!
Let's all go on a holiday in Cambodia! 
...for $15 trillion dollars or so.
...been one of the best investments in the US. Medical technology has made enormous strides thanks in no small part to the military. Civil, environmental, and structural engineering fields too. 
...would you sooner cut military spending or Medicare/Medicaid to help settle this enormous bill we've accumulated that's roughly equivalent in principle to 4-5 years of all federal spending combined?
It's not the military-industrial complex paying for all those fancy toys, it's taxpayers
...but you aren't that slick...
That issue is a little more complicated than just choosing one or the other. But you knew that already, right? Muri, muda, mura apply all around.
...in another thread. Keep up here.
I'm more familiar with the Guns and Butter than you are with lessons learned in lean manufacturing techniques apparently. Difference between a history major and an engineering major I guess...
...guns or butter?
...I don't find the answer so simple. Simple works for people who don't like to think too much or dislike details.
Maybe I can choose both....
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...and let's be clear, George W. Bush chose guns and butter with the result being a massive economic recession. I'll pose this question as an OP and I'd bet you a substantial majority will say butter.
"Simple works for people who don't like to think too much or dislike details."
Bullshit. Sometimes hard choices have to be made, that's what leadership is all about, making the tough choices.
Do you think I don't know how to use Google? The fact is that this is a classic model of political analysis and the choice of butter is actually relatively simple matter of risk. Guns can always be had if you have the butter, but if you go with guns, your butter won't keep very well. Just consider the state of the United States military before both World Wars and how easy it was to ramp up our military since we had so much butter. I really do suggest you watch the Eisenhower farewell message I posted above.
Also, when you make assumptions like the person you're debating with doesn't know the facts you do a great disservice to the debate. Attacking your opponents command of the facts is a sure losing debate tactic because it shows an unwillingness to address the actual debate tactic. If you would go to the Wiki link you would see that this is an analogy that has been around for almost 100 years! It is not my thing and it is not little 
We'll see what others have to say: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002355987
...about you and the facts when you attempt to make a complex socioeconomic principle a "simple matter of risk" when you obviously don't seem to know the vast difference in how this nation was engaged in the World Wars vs today. Do you honestly believe the populace today could be mobilized into anything approaching what was done in WW2? The transition from a draft to an all volunteer force? The level of integration of military and civil support structures? The major doctrinal changes of the US military over the last 30 years? The last 10? Laughable.
Just consider the state of the United States military before both World Wars and how easy it was to ramp up our military since we had so much butter.
No....no we did not. We were coming out of the Great Depression or had you forgotten? You might want to research mobilization efforts for wars fought by this country over the last 150 years or so. Conscription does amazing things to unemployment rates...
I really do suggest you pick up a few books and forget about Wiki and Google on this subject.
...it's not like we didn't have a massive transportation infrastructure in place or anything. Manufacturers simply retooled and the country was put on a war-footing rapidly. The reason we pulled through the Depression was in no small part because of government spending - ever hear of the WPA, CCC, or the TVA. You're again making the same mistake of presuming that I haven't read books on such subjects. Who do you think worked in the factories and manned the battle stations? Men and women who to a great extent had benefited from government relief spending, subsidies, and work programs. Without that spending, the US manpower needed might not have been there. All that butter spending undoubtedly was essential to the war effort when it was needed. Builds morale...
"Do you honestly believe the populace today could be mobilized into anything approaching what was done in WW2?"
This is why the Founding Fathers were largely against a large, permanent standing army - it breeds arrogance.
All that butter spending...
No...that was guns spending. We weren't building cars, people weren't spending (saving of as much earned income as possible was considered very patriotic during this period), and 40% of the GPD was defense spending. And we didn't have a massive transportation infrastructure at the time we mobilized...that came much later. After the war in fact. I don't know what books you have been reading but you need to do much better. I'll even let you take a look at the two footlockers of personal and period documents from my grandfather and great-grandfathers who were a Captain and General (respectively) during the war. One was a personal friend of Patton and I have several of the letter shared between them. Nothing like firsthand source documents ya know...
This is why the Founding Fathers were largely against a large, permanent standing army - it breeds arrogance.
No arrogance there, just a simple fact. Do you honestly believe that the current generation could be mobilized as readily as the generation 70 years past? The willingness to ration and give up on everyday durable goods to support a war effort? Wouldn't even come close to happening today. People like to whine and bitch about their first world problems too much and can't even bear the thought of being deprived of their Starbucks...
...but during the heart of the New Deal, not so much and it wasn't until Europe was already at war that we began to contemplate mobilization. I would argue that if we didn't invest in the citizenry during the New Deal, we would not have had a population as willing to fight.
Your bit about your grandfather is nice, and feel free to share in the http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1163" target="_blank">American History Group, but it has nothing to do with the question of Keynesian macroeconomics and defense spending as national priorities during the New Deal. Through 1941, the United States invested over $4 billion into transportation: roads, bridges, highways, airports, canals, and rail, not to mention development of our electric grid, power plants, sanitation projects, water supply, food supply, hospitals, schools, for total spending of about $13 billion -list of New Deal projects. The weapons that the American public made and the men that went to war in 1941 did so having heavily benefited from New Deal spending. Without it the nation would have been in even more dire straits, and much more slow in mobilization.
The amateur study of military history is no substitute for the academic study of American history 
Your dim view of your fellow Americans is noted.
Let me know when evidence of that is put forth. Any true academic would also argue that the outbreak of WW2 was the saving grace for the New Deal(s) because it is very arguable it wasn't as much of a success story as you would paint it in the years immediately preceding the war. I also doubt you'd be in a much favor of many of the practices then if you had actually lived during that time period yet retained your current political leanings...
Quite a broad and colorful "history brush" you are wagging there.
Your dim view of your fellow Americans is noted.
Oh sorry, didn't know I'd strike so close on that one...
Just showing how much of a militarist you are if you think the World War II alone created the post-war economic boom. Your counter-factual claim "that the outbreak of WW2 was the saving grace for the New Deal(s)" is a common conservative claim made to denigrate domestic spending by the government, as the following two articles by scholars show in support of the argument I have made above.
Guess What? The New Deal Worked!
Steven Conn
Mr. Conn is a professor and the director of public history in the History Department of Ohio State University and a writer for the History News Service. Attribution to the History News Service and the author is required for reprinting and redistribution.
Since the economic crisis we're now in is being compared to the Great Depression, the solutions being offered are being routinely compared to the New Deal. Republicans in particular have been quick to pronounce the New Deal a failure as a way of justifying their opposition to the new stimulus package and any other federal response to our new Great Depression.
Congressman Steve Austria (R-Ohio) is so angry at the New Deal that he told an audience recently that Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal actually caused the Great Depression: quite an achievement given that the Great Depression was already three years deep by the time FDR was elected.
Whatever you think of the Obama administration's proposals, to declare the New Deal a failure gets the history fundamentally wrong. The legacy that FDR created proved remarkably successful and remarkably enduring.
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The system the New Deal initiated kept us from experiencing a second Great Depression for nearly half a century. We are in our current mess in large measure because we dismantled that system. Republicans would have us be afraid of a new New Deal. But based on the track record of the original, a new New Deal is just what we need.
More: http://hnn.us/articles/62629.html
Have some more:
SOURCE: TheDailyBeast.com (3-30-09)
Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence (Random House) and The Case for Big Government.
Nothing better illustrates the tenacity of the political right in America than the attention it has won for its claims that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal made the Great Depression of the 1930s worse. Despite heavy political losses, the right soldiers on, maintaining if not building support for bigger battles it expects to come.
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The New Deal also aggressively built the nation’s roads and bridges, again a fact often neglected. In the 1920s, the nation’s surface infrastructure did not keep up with the increase in auto ownership. But the capital stock of the nation’s roads, bridges, and new highways rose by a remarkable 70 percent between 1929 and 1941. The development of sewers and water systems was almost as robust. This enormous investment laid the groundwork for the suburban development and growing commercial economy after World War II.
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Some on the right even deny the value of the new transportation infrastructure of the 1930s, claiming that public works spending did not produce an economic miracle. Of course it did not. It was never enough spending in the short run. Its benefits were longer term and critical to future prosperity, as public infrastructure has been since the beginning of the Republic.
One other neglected but remarkable fact should be mentioned, emphasized in particular in fine work by the economist Alex Field. Productivity rose rapidly in the 1930s. I don’t mean simple labor productivity—the output per hour of work. But total factor productivity, or TFP, rose at rates that exceeded growth in most other decades, including the 1920s. TFP is the true source of economic growth. It is, to simplify, the sum of new technologies, managerial innovations, learning on the job, scale economies due to growing demand, and other factors that cannot be attributed merely to increases in labor supply or capital investment. One reason, as Field persuasively computes, was the growth of surface transportation built by the government that made the productivity of private industry greater.
More: http://hnn.us/node/72061
Clearly, the long-term interest is served far more by spending on butter than by spending on guns, in the face of no real threat to national security that we could not meet with half our current military capacity.
I am a former member of a state youth conservation corps. What's your point? I can live without my Starbucks.
Barney Frank
February 11, 2009
I am a great believer in freedom of expression and am proud of those times when I have been one of a few members of Congress to oppose censorship. I still hold close to an absolutist position, but I have been tempted recently to make an exception, not by banning speech but by requiring it. I would be very happy if there was some way to make it a misdemeanor for people to talk about reducing the budget deficit without including a recommendation that we substantially cut military spending.
Sadly, self-described centrist and even liberal organizations often talk about the need to curtail deficits by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs that have a benign social purpose, but they fail to talk about one area where substantial budget reductions would have the doubly beneficial effect of cutting the deficit and diminishing expenditures that often do more harm than good. Obviously people should be concerned about the $700 billion Congress voted for this past fall to deal with the credit crisis. But even if none of that money were to be paid back--and most of it will be--it would involve a smaller drain on taxpayer dollars than the Iraq War will have cost us by the time it is concluded, and it is roughly equivalent to the $651 billion we will spend on all defense in this fiscal year.
---------
I am working with a variety of thoughtful analysts to show how we can make very substantial cuts in the military budget without in any way diminishing the security we need. I do not think it will be hard to make it clear to Americans that their well-being is far more endangered by a proposal for substantial reductions in Medicare, Social Security or other important domestic areas than it would be by canceling weapons systems that have no justification from any threat we are likely to face.
So those organizations, editorial boards and individuals who talk about the need for fiscal responsibility should be challenged to begin with the area where our spending has been the most irresponsible and has produced the least good for the dollars expended--our military budget. Both parties have for too long indulged the implicit notion that military spending is somehow irrelevant to reducing the deficit and have resisted applying to military spending the standards of efficiency that are applied to other programs. If we do not reduce the military budget, either we accustom ourselves to unending and increasing budget deficits, or we do severe harm to our ability to improve the quality of our lives through sensible public policy.
More: http://www.thenation.com/article/cut-military-budget
Why can't you live without a massive war machine?
You're wrong on the history, wrong on the issues, and wrong in your denigrations of the American people.
This will be easy.
First off.
Just showing how much of a militarist you are if you think the World War II alone created the post-war economic boom.
Please cite where, anywhere, that I've even hinted that WW2 was the sole mechanism for the post-war economic boom. I won't hold my breathe....errr...breath...
You might want to fix that.
Now your second blunder.
"that the outbreak of WW2 was the saving grace for the New Deal(s)" is a common conservative claim made to denigrate domestic spending by the government, as the following two articles by scholars show in support of the argument I have made above.
Except neither of those articles even mentions that. They mention some twittery about the New Deal causing the Great Depression or making it worse. Neither mention, in any specific or implied fashion, my talking point. Oops, your reading comprehension is in need of calibration. I'd recommend an NIST certified lab for that.
Number three.
Clearly, the long-term interest is served far more by spending on butter than by spending on guns, in the face of no real threat to national security that we could not meet with half our current military capacity.[/quote]
And I think, as I've stated, that the long term interest is best served on a balance of both. There truly is room for serious spending decreases on both sides. You see, given your lack of understanding of the current military support structure, it really is impossible not to include one without the other anymore. What you also fail to understand is how the military is getting smaller and has been for a long time. Current draw-downs are in the tens of thousands and will be easily exceeded through natural attrition that follows most deployments. For someone who seems have such a strong dislike for the military I find it hard to believe you could qualify an analysis that our security needs could be met with half the current force when you don't understand even a tiny fraction of it. Massive military machine? Not in decades and certainly not with the current force projections put us WAY down in terms of military growth in comparison with the rest of the world. I think we are somewhere in the 60's along with France and the UK now.
You are wrong on pretty much everything.
The argument you made was and I quote "the outbreak of WW2 was the saving grace for the New Deal(s)" - you have in no way established that the New Deal needed saving grace, and in fact, it's a very strong argument to suggest the United States could not have mobilized as fast as it did without it. You also make the claim above that "we didn't have a massive transportation infrastructure at the time we mobilized" and as we can see from the statistics I have offered we had just made major investment in our transportation infrastructure. You also claim above that "conscription does amazing things to unemployment rates," but the New Deal did substantially bring down unemployment, and it only rose when government spending was cutback. The problem was not-enough stimulus, but when you think about the return that all that war spending brought in terms of boosting the economy, it is certainly debatable what the rate of return was given the immense cost.
Don't like people calling out the vagaries of your argument, don't make them. Clearly, the New Deal was a resounding success and the United States could not have mobilized as successfully as it did without its investment in transportation and social services. FDR turned the country around with his policies and with these substantial investments the United States was able to quickly defeat three major military powers in less than 5 years. You have not demonstrated one bit that in peace time we cannot cut the military way back and somehow jeopardize our ability to achieve our national security goals.
Don't look now, but our bloated military machine has been in Afghanistan for 10 years and still can't get the job done. We have made a very poor investment in these pointless wars and now you would sooner put the cost on the civilian population than dial back the military-industrial complex. It is no secret that we spend as much rest of the world combined on defense! Unless you're planning on picking a war with the PRC, we don't need anywhere near the current size or expenditure.
We should be spending on butter, but you want to spend it on guns...The sooner we cut back the better. It seems to you that keeping people in military service is more important than rebuilding our transportation infrastructure, investing in our social programs, and protecting our environment. That's 
- let's cut back to the 2000 level adjusted for inflation.
Keep digging.
you have in no way established that the New Deal needed saving grace, and in fact, it's a very strong argument to suggest the United States could not have mobilized as fast as it did without it.
Just the simple fact that WW2 provided EXACTLY the mechanism for government spending Keynes was advocating yet wasn't happening as strongly as the New Deal programs provided by themselves. The New Deal wasn't enough (or do you deny the that the economy suffered a relapse in the years immediately preceding the war?) and WW2 provided a needed boost.
You also make the claim above that "we didn't have a massive transportation infrastructure at the time we mobilized" and as we can see from the statistics I have offered we had just made major investment in our transportation infrastructure.
Sure, just ignore the lagging time period between when investment is made and work is actually completed. That massive infrastructure DID NOT exist before the war as I correctly stated. It was built during, and in most part finished, after the war. Do you even have a clue to how much in terms of electrical generation capacity was added during the war to fund specific research and industrial activities geared solely to the war effort? I though not. That Interstate Highway System? When did that come around? Oh yeah, after the war.
As for the rest of your swill you have not, nor will not, ever find a place where I even hinted that I want to spend money on guns in preference to butter. I want balanced, reasonable spending on both. Your ignorance on the function of our military as it relates to current infrastructure, environmental stewardship, and medical support is astounding. Cutting the military force in half is stupid, myopic, and beyond what anyone with even a basic understanding of current economic policies would consider. Pathetic arguments from someone who considers himself having an academic pedigree in history....
If World War II had not happened, and the U.S. had kept up the New Deal instead of backsliding in 1937, the economy would have rebounded just the same. Stimulus works!
So your logic is that the U.S. didn't have an extensive highway system until the Interstate Highway System?
- Also, I think you're forgetting the extent of the railroad system.
United states Numbered Highways
1941
How did we ever beat the Nazis and the Empire of Japan without the Interstate Highway System?
So all the work that was done in the New Deal was insignificant to World War II mobilization?
The time is fast approaching to make such hard choices. Wait who are we fighting that justifies doubling our defense expenditures over the last decade? We gotta be ready to fight those ChiComms, it's going to take all the dollars we can get!
Keep showing that anger, it really shows your true colors. You've earned it:
Oooh I'm scared now
- he used a -
If World War II had not happened, and the U.S. had kept up the New Deal instead of backsliding in 1937, the economy would have rebounded just the same.
Until you provide proof from that alternate reality and I'm just going to say "maybe, maybe not" because your imagination doesn't count as a source document....
So your logic is that the U.S. didn't have an extensive highway system until the Interstate Highway System?
1955? Aren't we talking about 20 years or so earlier here? Show me that map in 1935...
Also, you do know that during the war certain highways were identified as being strategic assets and new technologies and engineering techniques were developed to build more roads that became the basis of our current system. As for forgetting about out rail network, I did not. I also know that the ton/mile capacity in 1937 was less than a third of what it would be by 1943. WW2 was a period of exponential expansion for the railroad system FYI.
Keep showing that anger, it really shows your true colors.
Anger? Humor and disdain for an individual who thinks himself an academic yet has done nothing to prove it rather. I'm sorry, but hard choices are one thing but what you advocate borders on lunacy. Reality will prove me out in the long term, which is fine by me....
Color me
SOURCE: Washington Monthly (March-April) (3-1-09)
James K. Galbraith’s new book is The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. He holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, and is senior scholar with the Levy Economics Institute.
If the banking system is crippled, then to be effective the public sector must do much, much more. How much more? By how much can spending be raised in a real depression? And does this remedy work? Recent months have seen much debate over the economic effects of the New Deal, and much repetition of the commonplace that the effort was too small to end the Great Depression, something achieved, it is said, only by World War II. A new paper by the economist Marshall Auerback has usefully corrected this record. Auerback plainly illustrates by how much Roosevelt’s ambition exceeded anything yet seen in this crisis:
"[Roosevelt’s] government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York’s Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown. It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country’s entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock."
In other words, Roosevelt employed Americans on a vast scale, bringing the unemployment rates down to levels that were tolerable, even before the war—from 25 percent in 1933 to below 10 percent in 1936, if you count those employed by the government as employed, which they surely were. In 1937, Roosevelt tried to balance the budget, the economy relapsed again, and in 1938 the New Deal was relaunched. This again brought unemployment down to about 10 percent, still before the war.
The New Deal rebuilt America physically, providing a foundation (the TVA’s power plants, for example) from which the mobilization of World War II could be launched. But it also saved the country politically and morally, providing jobs, hope, and confidence that in the end democracy was worth preserving. There were many, in the 1930s, who did not think so.
More: http://hnn.us/node/69415
Stimulus is bad, handouts to military contractors is good
...with the aircraft flying in formation. Or with the US military in general. Quite happy we have the force we do...
Not by me, mind you... 
...seeing as those that would call me that and think it derogatory don't have the breadth of experience I do. Been in a lot of other countries and I know how good we have it here thanks in large part to the US armed forces. I've been in a lot of those countries because of the military at that...
...I'm just going to enjoy the show...
You mean all is not milk and honey in the land of Iraq!
...if you don't love guns, things that explode, and trillion of dollars being flushed down tubes, you're ignorant. 
...that requires a massive global projection of force and a the ability to destroy the Earth many times over.
But, but, but 
- you don't understand, if we reduce the size and cost of our military to a reasonable level Halliburton stock will go down!
...aircraft carrier groups. Seems our military is bigger than it's necessary tasks. But as you made clear above, you would rather cut military and domestic spending equally. You want to cut both guns and butter equally, when really it's quite clear we have way too damn many weapons of war and a decaying domestic socio-economic infrastructure. Good thing President Obama is taking steps to reduce the size of our bloated military.
Time to start pounding swords into plowshares.
BTW - I agree with Barney Frank, we can cut $200 billion and not lessen our defense capability in any way.
...you're raining on his Red Dawn fantasy. Coincidentally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn_%282012_film%29
If we cut back our bloated military-industrial complex we would be utterly vulnerable to invasion!
That is cause. Here is effect...
But sure... let's continue to cheer on that ours are bigger, shiner, faster, and more expensive. Britain did precisely the same with their battle ship fleet until they too, realized far too late, that the empire had already waned and never told them...
