Re: Sen. Harry Reid, NV: Wildfires caused by global warming

On Oct 29, 8:49 am, James Arthur <dagmargoodb...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Oct 28, 11:51 am, bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:





On Oct 28, 6:40 pm, James Arthur wrote:
On Oct 27, 4:46 pm, bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:

On Oct 26, 7:25 pm, James Arthur wrote:
On Oct 26, 2:29 am, bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Oct 26, 6:06 am, James Arthur wrote:
On Oct 25, 2:52 pm, bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
On Oct 25, 6:36 pm, James Arthur wrote:

[...]

We've been protecting the world since WWII. That's expensive.

But that's not where most of the money is going.

True, now. Most of our money is presently spent on ineffectual social
programs.

Not true.

http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm

Bill, that link is just plain embarrassing--no wonder you have such
wacky, misbegotten theories.

I rather liked the way they lumped the interest on the national debt
into military expenditure, on the not-unreasonable basis that this was
just paying for previous wars.

That's one of their most glaring errors--wrongly attributing all debt
to warfare.

We've spent a great deal more on welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and
Johnson's war on poverty. Social programs have been roughly 2/3rds the
budget for quite some time; by any fair measure, they deserve an equal
proportion of the debt.

That's not opinion, that's accounting...amortization.

It's opinion. Your national debt has been built up over a long time -
much longer than the period that you have been spending 2/3rds of your
budget on what you chose to classify as social programs, and you could
attribute each dollar of debt to the expenditure that incurred it.
That would be a valid system of amortization, Claiming that the debt
should be assigned on the basis of the way you spend money now is not.

Here you have a point--the amount of blame for any annual deficit
should be apportioned year-by-year according to each category's
proportion of that year's budget.

OTOH, it's preposterous to say that all defense spending is spent on
warfare.

Huh? You want to distinguish between spending on warfare, and spending
in preparation for war?

As Clausewitz said, war is merely an extension of political activity
by other means and peace-time spending on "defence" is part of that
ploitical activity.

Comparing war- and peace-time figures clearly illustrates
that point. So, properly, your link should only attribute *excess*--
not all--defense spending to warfare.

Nonsense. Peace time spending is devoted to intimidating your enemies
and dissuading them from attacking you. The force that never has to
fight is extremely cost-effective.

Also, a large part of defense spending comes back as revenue -- taxes
on profits and wages -- offsetting something in the vicinity of 25-40%
of the amount actually spent. When it comes to apportioning deficits
this revenue should properly be deducted.

This is true of every other government expenditure, so it is a
complete red herring.

Anyway, the site's methods and figures being absurd on their face, I
didn't previously bother with the minutiae. Since you insist on
pressing the point, I took several hours and investigated.

I complied the following data with the most generous possible
assumptions in your favor: a) that all defense spending is for war,
and b) that defense spending does not produce any offsetting revenue.

Consider this an engineer's guide to the question; an approximation,
not perfect, but close enough for our purposes.

=======
RESULTS, adjusted to 2004 dollars per the Consumer Price Index data:
=======
(view tables in Courier font)

Historical Budget Data from Congressional Budget Office (1).
Inflation adjustment figures per US Bureau of Labor Statistics'
Consumer Price Index data (2)

TOTAL EXPENDITURE, 1962-2004, (all figures in 2004 dollars)
===========================================================
Social Security 12,541 x 10^9 dollars
Medicare 5,079 "
Medicaid 2,432 "
Income Security 4,301 "
Other Retirement
and disability 4,099 "
Defense 15,699 "
------
TOTAL of above 44,151 "

TOTAL, all outlays,
for all purposes 62,269 "

PUBLIC DEBT 1962-2004, (all figures in 2004 dollars)
==========================================================
Total debt, 1962 $1,552 "
Total increase in debt,
1962-2004: $8,554 "

Total portion of increased debt apportionable
to defense (3): $2,096 "

==========
CONCLUSION
==========
Even if we assume all debt existing in 1962 was war debt, and all
defense spending since 1962 has been for warfare, the two together are
about $3,600 x 10^9, roughly 1/3rd of the current U.S. national debt.

So: attributing 80% of the interest on the nation debt to past
warfare--or even defense spending--is WRONG.

No, it is just a point of view. US spending on "defence" has been
disproportionately high for a long time now. Spending as much as the
combined total of the ten runner-ups in the defence spending stakes
isn't defensible, and if you hadn't done it your national debt
wouldn't have increased at all.

All the social expenditures in your budgets are cheese-paringly mean,
so attributing 100% of the increase in the national debt to your one
blatant extravagance seems entirely defensible to me.

--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen


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