LMGTFY…Wikipedia says no, but the US is more than a third of worldwide expenditures. $682 billion US out of $1753 billion worldwide.
Sure, as long as we never go to war or anything.
Looking at those budget stats, I think we need to take Wolfowitz’s advice and double our DoD spending ASAP!
I’m pretty sure that practically every single minimum wage law ever created also includes exceptions for age (and sometimes other factors).
Make Love not War (too the world). Seriously.
Currently a small tiny percentile of your nation makes the money from all the wars. The rest of you (have been for a long time) pick up the bill for that profiteering. It’s quite genius really (in an ‘Evil genius’ kind of way), and all wrapped so very tightly in the star spangled banner that makes it hard to do otherwise, but you could (and should), if you are actually serious about the budget deficit.
It’s going to be a slow week, so I’m going to make the dubious assumption that this is not a drunken troll attempt.
But seriously, you hear this an awful lot: The US makes all the money off of the world’s wars, big and little. I’ve pretty much always accepted this as truth since I’d kind of like to think that we’re making money off of something nowadays, but it doesn’t seem to hold up to much light scrutiny - the US doesn’t actually have the largest arms manufacturer (that’s BAE); the US doesn’t actually provide most of the military-grade small arms (surplus AK-variants are dirt-cheap, preferred over US-made AR-variants, and mostly come from former Soviet states); and the US sells most of its macro-scale military hardware (e.g., planes, ships) to first-world allies that don’t actually tend to get involved in wars.
So if you go to Wikipedia and look at arms exports, the US is ranked first, with Russia being a close second. The deltas between the top two (US and Russia) and the next tier (China, Ukraine, Germany) is almost an order of magnitude. But if you dig into the SIPRI data a bit, you find that “arms exports” is a pretty vague term… it turns out that military aid to other countries is considered an “arms export” even though it’s not necessarily a profitable exercise and it doesn’t always involve actual, you know, weapons.
And I guess that’s fair: If the US gives $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt, there are probably some stipulations with that gift that say that any equipment purchased must be from US manufacturers, and chances are that military aid isn’t going to be spent on feeding kids. But even so, it starts to get a little fiddly as to whether that’s arms profiteering – a good amount of that $1.3B is going to soldier salaries, and you could argue that US aid to Egypt’s military means more food in the mouths of Egypt’s children, but that’s all debatable. But that does mean that a lot of SIPRI’s numbers (especially for the US and Russia) come not from direct arms sales, but from cash transfers.
But that’s all at the macro-level and still mostly deals with big tanks and planes and whatnot, and I gather that’s not what Zak meant. I am still willing to believe that US corporations benefit disproportionately from, say, a brush war in the Ivory Coast… but I’d sure like to understand how.
I believe the vague statement of profiteering is more about the shift in economic needs resulting from a war than the actual arms sales (unless someone wants to dive into consipiracy theories about the CIA teaming up with arms dealers to fund both sides of every war that has ever taken place in the last 1000 years), and the world’s most powerful economy (getting to be somewhat arguable, but I believe the U.S. still is) would naturally stand to make the most money off of those changes. There is some logic to that, although I’d suspect that local resources would see the highest profit margins. It’s just that when those are exhausted or saturated, companies from the U.S. would be able to easily handle the overflow of need.
note - NOT an economist, so take this all with a heap of salt
I think the idea is that we declare a war on nation X. Someone has to sell the government arms for that war. Someone has to pay to rebuild. That sort of thing.
I mean big weapons developers obviously make money when we’re at war, they sell weapons. Then there’s the Haliburtons of the world and the like that make a decent profit cleaning up or whatever.
The trillions of dollars we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 10 years went somewhere. The point is that it could have stayed at home and been spent on other things.
The “defense” budget of the USA is $682 billion a year. Nobody knows what the black budget is. 10% of the known budget is $68,200,000,000. Is that enough?
It’s all ‘fake’ anyway, the budgets and financial concerns stuff, ‘busy work’ to keep you all occupied. The money is an illusion for the most part, simply pulled out of thin air and lent to the rest of us.
Uhuh…
feelin it…
sure…
So much is spent on hate and division for the profits of the few at the cost of the many. It really doesn’t have to be this way, we can all make the difference if we are truly brave.
Yeah, man. It’s like, do you own things, or do things own YOU? Man.
exactly. crazy.
I’m a little late to this game, but I love some of the ideas. My fantasy economic plan would start wit a constitutionally set flat tax rate. I would either go with the Fair Tax national sales tax (replacing income tax) or my own idea of a flat tax (maybe up to 20%) for all income over a certain ammount. That amount would be 2x the Health and Human Services poverty line. Say if the poverty line was found to be $11,490 (current as of 2013 for an individual iirc) so any person could earn up to $22,980 without paying any tax (we can debate actual amount 2x, 2.5x etc). Then a flat 10, 20 or 30% tax rate (also debatable) on anything earned over that amount. The only exceptions to income would be 401k, approved charitable donations, medical flex spending and educational savings.
Minimum wage would be tied to this same number, either the actual number ($11490) 1.5x (417235) or the same number as above $22980. This number would then be divided out by 40 hours a week by 52 weeks a year is the new hourly wage.
I agree that the purpose of minimum wage is to affect a minimum standard of living, so dependent minors who have no need for this can have a lower minimum wage.
We would need to have a mirror tarrif on Countries we trade with. If they charge us to do business in their country then we can charge them equally. Since our welfare, unemployment and other economic funds are tied to income taxes we may look to creating a specific tarrif for countries that are taking jobs. Call centers, manufacturing etc can be done in the country albeit for a higher price, but if countries or maybe better yet, businesses had to pay a higher tax for sending jobs over seas they would bring some of those jobs back.
That should cover pretty much how we would get income. Now lets look at spending. Again I would look at this being a constitutionally imbedded budget so that it can’t be changed on the whim of washington.
For the next 10 years or so there should be an across the board cut in all spending, say about 8%. We will continue to spend the same ammount as we do now but that 8% will go into a fund earning interest. Somewhere in the next 8-10 years, with interest, that fund will be equal to 100% of our current budget. From that point going forward the budget for fiscal year 2 will be the actual earnings from fiscal year 1. That way in one year we can earn the money and and some investment gains and in the next year we have an actual budget. We would then have to constrain our spending to fit that budget, with some allowances for borrowing in emergencies.
Any payments on borrowed money must take first priority in subsequent budgets to pay off in a reasonable time.
By moving to a flat or fair tax we could reduce the size of the IRS to about 10% its current size which would save almost $13 billion annually. I would also reduce the ammount of foreign aid which is almost $50 billion. I know these are small drops in a rather large sea, but they are starts.
How would moving to a regressive flat tax reduce the IRS by 90%? The equation for a progressive tax system can be coded in a single line.
I would think the IRS is there to review the thousands of deductions and the non/under reporting that’s going on.
Jonathan Swift would love this thread.
First I don’t think of it as regressive. I think of it as more fair. I understand both points, that equal percentages are equal for all people regarless of income. But I also understand that when real dollars are associated its harder to make ends meet if you are making say $20,000 and being taxed 20% leaving you with $16,000 to live off of rather than someone making $200,000 at the same rate taking home $160,000. In both cases the percentage is equal but there is a higher burden to meet the costs of living for the lower income.
That said taxing the higher earner a higher percentage is equally unfair, as it is taking more of their earnings asking them to put more skin in the game than someone else. Aside from that I could never support a “progressive” tax system so long as there are people paying no taxes or getting more back then they put in.
That all said, I support the idea of allowing everyone to earn a certain amount and having equal taxes for everyone beyond that amount. I also support getting rid of loopholes and deductions and other codes that make the auditing process difficult.
I feel like simplifying that code would streamline the IRS as a smaller crew would be sufficient for managing the accounts. If we collected exactly what was required we wouldn’t need to send out refunds every year or perform audits as much either.
Just to be clear, “fair” and “regressive” are not mutually exclusive. One is a personal judgement, the other is an assessment of impact compared to the status quo.
By this logic, the most fair system would be to tax everyone an equal amount, regardless of income. Fair! Everyone has the exact same amount of skin in the game!
Problem #1: You have a floor before taxation is levied, so you already broke your “getting more back then they put in rule” for everyone below or around this floor.
Problem #2: Your goal of removing IRS jobs by never needing refunds or performing audits is broken too.
Example (simple numbers to make the math easier)
Joe makes $3,000 a month
System allows $18,000/year tax free
Tax rate is 50%
Result: Each month, Joe pays $750 in tax // he’s projected to earn 36,000. He’ll need to pay 50% of 36,000-18,000, or $9000 in tax. This is $750 a month.
Joe is laid off on July 1st and remains unemployed until year end.
He’s made $18,000 income, yet paid $4,500 in tax. He deserves a $4,500 refund as the first $18,000 is tax free. This also happens for bonuses, second jobs, raises, start dates after Jan 1st, contractors, people with variable pay (service industry), etc.
There is a small group of employees that would never need a refund or pay money at year end. The same exact group that would exist with multiple tax brackets.
Problem #3: One of the main reasons we have a progressive tax system is the snowball effect. The more money a person has, the easier it becomes to generate additional money. The United States is the perfect example of this over the last few decades. The tax system went more regressive (relative to the 60s and 70s) and wealth equality plummeted. A progressive tax system is the major lever stopping an ever-growing percentage of the wealth flowing into fewer and fewer hands.