(February 24, 2014 at 5:56 pm)Mr. Moncrieff Wrote: In my opinion, military spending should be pro rata, defined by combining how much you are financing education and health in your nation.
In other words, the military will only get sufficient financing that they consider necessary of health care and education are allocated a comparable significance.
The USA spends about 2.5x as much on Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid currently. I would not use them as a basis for determining defense spending. I would judge how much we need each and allocate spending based on need.
With a population that is both growing and growing older, spending on benefits for the local (and aging) population is a pretty obvious concern. We could spend more on those and justify it.
With a nation that is in a relatively secure position (peaceful borders, oceans on either end) we could spend drastically less on defense and also justify it. A lot of our military spending is for keeping troops and equipment stationed throughout the world, and I think we could recall quite a lot of them without any significant issues arising, and perhaps even build some goodwill in many areas. Other nations may not like having to increase their own military spending to make up the loss, but I think it's better that they take a larger hand in defending their own.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
