From Tea Party Nation leader Judson Phillips, via the Economist:
If we decided to build a couple of new carriers, thousands of workers would be hired for the shipyards. Thousands of employees would be hired for the steel mills that would provide the steel for the hull and various sub contractors would hire thousands. Do you know what that means?It means they would receive paychecks and go out and spend that money. That would help a recovery. That is a shovel ready project!Increasing spending for the military does a couple of things. It not only not only stimulates the economy, it protects our nation. That is a better investment than say spending money on teaching Chinese prostitutes how to drink responsibly.
I hold very strong views regarding the claim that military spending helps the economy. As I explained last August:
The most obvious example of the unproductive use of money is war. Time, labour, materials, ideas and spending go into warfare, and what comes out? Destruction — bombs are destroyed when they hit the ground, and they destroy the area around which they hit. They destroy infrastructure, they kill people, and they create hatred and resentment that very often triggers more and greater warfare.
Most bizarrely, the Tea Party has since its inception (supposedly) been committed to reducing government expenditures. Military expenditures, both in absolute terms, and as a proportion of GDP are skyrocketing: they have never been higher. And is America safer than ever? Is the additional military spending helping us pay down debt?
No. America’s indebtedness is the problem that allows China to boss America around. The level of taxation and debt necessary for high military spending is preventing America from investing in the poor, in youth, in alternative energy, and in infrastructure that would create wealth, opportunity and security for the nation, instead of short-termist gains for corporations, bureaucrats and the military industrial complex.
Phillips’ bizarre statement adds fuel to the fire of the view that the Tea Party is (largely) a manipulated group of poor and lower-middle class voters who are in fact manoeuvring for the interests of a tiny corporatist and industrialist elite. The “all government spending is bad” rhetoric has quickly been turned around to “spend less on welfare, spend more on bombing brown people to death”, the rallying cry of Big-Government Neo-Conservatives like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. That administration increased the national debt by a higher proportion than any Presidency in history, creating deeper debt woes, and handing huge power and wealth to investors like the Communist Party of China. Those early anti-tax and anti-debt protests were long ago astroturfed by Corporatists who want more and more government handouts to big business and to the military industrial complex.
Should you hate the Tea Party? No. The Tea Party protesting on the street is not your enemy: the poor and lower-middle class are “taxed enough already”, often paying a higher nominal income tax rate than hedge fund billionaires. Like many in America, they and their children are increasingly unemployed. Their house prices have fallen. Their businesses have stumbled. They are having difficulty getting loans to invest in new projects and businesses. There is too much debt. So the Tea Party are right to get mad. They are right to get angry. But their targets — immigrants, welfare recipients, climate change scientists, foreigners and liberals — are way off the mark. The real enemy of freedom in America is corporatism, and billionaires who live off government handouts and military spending, who prevent tax hikes on the super-rich, and who prevent spending on jobs and infrastructure for the poor. The Tea Party movement has been deliberately misdirected, and now we see what its leaders are gunning for: more military spending, more government handouts to big business, more jobs for the boys. This is what has to end for America to get back on its feet. So once again, I give you Eisenhower’s 1961 speech:
Thousands of jobs to build carriers. Thousands of jobs in steel mills. No wealth created.
Judson Phillips is an idiot.
If we decided to build space habitats, where thousands of
people could live in a powered space colony that could travel
anywhere in the solar system, hundreds of millions of workers
would be hired to build the foundation of the industry. It is
an industry that would build the future of the human race.
Along the way poverty, hunger, and illiteracy, would end as a
world of abundance would develop as a consequence. A space
transportation system able to carry millions of people to and
from space would be built. Mining of resources from the moon
and other moons and planets of the solar system would be
developed. There would be hundreds of millions of jobs, and
the trickle down and up effect would create many millions more
jobs. Do you know what that means? Ultimately there would be
more jobs than people. And each of those people would receive
a paycheck and go out and spend that money. That would happen
without murdering millions of people in more senseless wars,
without monetary systems used by a few insane oligarchs to
benefit themselves enslave the world. Without psychopaths in
positions of “leadership” in governments and business.
Building space habitats and developing the technology to do so
is a shovel ready project! It not only not only stimulates the
economy, it protects our nation, by providing vision and
leadership for a better world. That is a better investment
than say listening to idiots without vision and spending money
on building a couple new carriers, to fight unnecessary future
wars with yesterdays technology, to senselessly murder
innocent people for the interests of insane fascist corporate
and government interests. Any person who advocates building
carriers for war as a means to stimulate the economy is a
psychopathic ignorant evil bastard.
“… The level of taxation and debt necessary for high military spending is preventing America from investing in the poor, in youth, in alternative energy, and in infrastructure that would create wealth, opportunity and security for the nation, instead of short-termist gains for corporations, bureaucrats and the military industrial complex. …”
Quite so. Modern – real – wealth is real and open education, communication, health, and ‘fabbers’ (for example, both ‘macro’ and ‘nano’ ), and the like. I suppose that means de-centralized open-source low-carb energy and production. Let’s not forget ‘cleanup’, shall we? And investment in social … all the right words have been way too kidnapped and twisted … allow me to (humbly) call it ‘empathy’, then.
Articles and speeches like the above help expose the problem in structure and function. They help support finding ways out from under the outdated, gorging, rotting, moribund beast. Actually getting out, though, is still mean chore.
Chè será será. But, if only we could endeavor to get there without all the wailing misery, fear, hate, cruelty, and bloodshed. I ascribe to this little idea of a Tibetan monastery, somewhere up on Olypus Mons, for starters.
G’day!
@Robert Mockan: your space project will not be possible for at least the next 50 years. The USSA needs a solution NOW.
Like Max says, what’s the point of having the worlds largest military if you cant afford the oil to run it.
Harry,
the space project was possible 50 years ago, if the Orion pulse propulsion space ship had been made operational. The space project was possible 40 years ago if a fleet of Sea Dragon heavy lift sea launched booster rockets had been built. Every decade other advances make the space project simpler and less costly. The trillions of dollars used to bail out banks, and wage wars of aggression, could have built prototype operational space habitats. The space project was possible 10 years ago if the MagLev “space train” had been built that would enable literally millions of people every year to travel into space. See here: http://www.angelfire.com/biz6/mythicprojects/PUR-19.pdf
The space project requires vision and leadership. Without that then even another 50 years from now the world may very well be like it is today, only worse.
This guy does know what to “tea bag” someone means?
@Bill
No, but I’m sure the person who created the sign did.
Prediction: Obama will leave the spotlight having done his job (saved the Bankers from the people), allowing Romney to step in and launch his looney tune wars.
Bat….
Shit…
Crazy…
@Bill
With that grin on the kid’s face I’m sure he knows what it means thanks to the internet.
Father of US marine killed by Afghan officer speaks out
http://youtu.be/D5XBFChpIJ0
gut-wrenching sad!!!!