When we spend $1 trillion a year on our military, just which states was that protecting from invasion? Did the Air Force repel a Dutch beachhead on the Alaskan coast last year that I didn't hear about?
All of that is to protect foreigners. Europe, east Asia, etc. When you hear about the US navy going after pirates off the coast of Somalia, that money wasn't spent protecting US citizens in most cases. When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland?
And that's just the military. There are so many slush funds going on, I don't think anyone can truly know just how much cash gets sent to or spent on foreigners. I don't think it's quite to 31%, but that guess isn't an order of magnitude high or anything like that.
Don't play dumb, products manufactured in Asia, for US companies, that are then shipped to Europe or elsewhere for sale.
I hate to break it to you but the majority of products sold by US companies are not made in the USA any more. You are welcome to see how well the US economy performs when their is no policing of the world's shipping routes or security around the underseas cables your tech companies rely upon.
>Don't play dumb, products manufactured in Asia, for US companies, that are then shipped to Europe or elsewhere for sale.
That sounds more like it's to China's benefit than the United States' (or Europe's). If that wasn't spent, not only would there be an easier tax burden, but more incentive to manufacture domestically, employing people here.
I've lived my whole life through the China-makes-everything era, and the few pennies people saved getting cheap junk never outweighed the reduction in income they suffered when jobs went away.
>I hate to break it to you but the majority of products sold by US companies are not made in the USA any more.
How are they US companies, if they're selling products manufactured elsewhere, employing 1/50th (or even less) of the workforce they should? They're more like the overseas offices of Chinese companies with an English-friendly name.
>You are welcome to see how well the US economy performs when their is no policing of the world's shipping routes
I've already seen how it performs with the policing. And it can't get any worse for anyone who is in the bottom 90%. It can't get much worse for the greenies worrying about global warming, but failing to put together that making things 12,000 miles away and shipping it across the ocean embiggens the carbon footprint.
Ocean lane policing is the bad solution to a problem we should've never had in the first place, a problem we can get rid of, and it costs too much besides. Saying "but we should protect Chinese profits!" doesn't much change that.
> When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland?
Yes it was. The primary threat is the illegal drug trade, you know, the one that results in more than 100,000 overdose deaths per year in the US. The drug trade is a huge part of how groups like ISIS get financed. When you take out the group, you take out the people playing the drug trade to finance them, and you weaken the drug trade.
At the end of the day, there's the rules-based international order, and then there's everybody outside it. The law and the outlaws. Outlaws will collaborate to fuel their self-interest. When you weaken some outlaws, you weaken the rest; when you weaken some areas of the law, you weaken the rest as well.
Of course the only reason ISIS existed as any sort of threat was because the village idiots and war criminals Bush Cheney and Rumsfeld invaded Iraq and overthrew their regime.
$750B for defense was 3% of the federal budget in 2024. USA plans to shrink defense budget by 40%, to less than 2%, while asking other NATO members to increase their budgets to 5%.
China plans to spend 7.2% of their budget on defense in 2025.
Russia plans to spend 32.5% of their budget on defense in 2025.
Anyway, it looks like USA is #1 now, but Trump wants to make USA #2 by military spending (with purchasing power parity) by 2030, which is not a smart move in the middle of WWIII.
You better read news from media carefully, especially U.S. news on China:
1. "China's defense budget stays under 1.5% of GDP for years".True.
2. "China will increase its defense budget 7.2% this year".True.
> Yet some analysts have recently argued that China’s defense spending is much larger still, and their new numbers have gained the attention of wider audiences. The Economist has reported that China’s defense spending has already reached two-thirds of U.S. spending and is “catching up quickly.” Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told Congress in 2021 that “the Russian and Chinese budgets exceed our budgets if all the cards are put on the table.” In September 2023, U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan claimed that China’s defense spending is “probably close to about $700 billion” — three times higher than Beijing’s official defense budget. Apparently worried that China is poised to match or even surpass U.S. spending, Congress introduced legislation in June 2023 calling for the development of new methods for measuring, comparing, and reporting on China’s defense spending.
So, China and Russia increased their military spending a lot, while Trump disarms USA like Zelenskiy did just before fool scale invasion.
All of that is to protect foreigners. Europe, east Asia, etc. When you hear about the US navy going after pirates off the coast of Somalia, that money wasn't spent protecting US citizens in most cases. When we were dropping drone bombs on ISIS, was ISIS any threat to the US mainland?
And that's just the military. There are so many slush funds going on, I don't think anyone can truly know just how much cash gets sent to or spent on foreigners. I don't think it's quite to 31%, but that guess isn't an order of magnitude high or anything like that.