Yes, we spent it on guns and butter. But there's no longer tons of money. We're broke. Half the budget is paid for with borrowed money or printed. Regardless of what we did with the money, it's gone. We went from the biggest creditor nation in the world in the 1950s to the largest debtor nation in the world currently. There's not enough tax money available to support the debt and promises the government has made with social security, medicare, and defense, NAto, carriers, F35's, Obamacare, etc.
When I suggested here to let Germany meet their 2% NATO commitment and pay for two more divisions of their own troops so American divisions can go home to save Americans money, everyone here laughed at me. And now the administration is promising more trillions for infrastructure, green development, energy rebates, health care, etc. There's not enough green ink. The bill's come due.
You could save a lot by shutting down half of your 700 military bases. That will still leave you a lot. And given that they're run by the government, they're probably very inefficient anyway so you won't be losing much.
Leaving aside all the polemics about wasteful inefficient government, a boring clichéd meme by now, the idea of comparing what government does to what the private sector does is a bit nonsense to begin with, though, isn't it? I mean, of course it's true that the government would do a lousy job of designing and building a smartphone (generally speaking), and that's why you don't assign those kinds of tasks to government. Much the same reason that you don't let real estate developers make long-term zoning decisions for a city, since they don't represent the citizens of that city.
It is true that the developers would not spend years and years trying accommodate the needs and desires of all the stakeholders the way a government has to, but you either believe in democratic decision making or you don't. It's often messy and time-consuming, nature of the beast. Applying the same metrics to the two sectors make little sense.
Your mantra "private good, government bad" is simple-minded and not useful. Also, as an aside, the attempts above to paint the federal government as especially bad is quite funny given the hilarious track record of incompetent state legislatures. I mean, guys, are you serious? Didn't one of your states attempt to redefine the value of 𝛑 once?
But I don't believe that you will solve these problems anytime soon. So long as you believe that it's ok to allow large corporate money to dominate political fund-raising, you are guaranteeing that governments will not be neutral, which is the aspirational ideal, imo. You yourself gave away your thinking on this a few pages ago. I forget the exact context buy you accused the Biden government of catering to unions, as though that were, in and of itself, a bad thing. That's an interesting point of view, it's as if you are
a priori deciding that the wants and desires of one group of your fellow citizens, those who belong to unions, are not as important as the wants/desires of others. If you think it's ok, then, for some citizens to be more important than others, then your society is toast, since that more or less goes against the very idea of the American experiment, doesn't it? Or do you actually believe that rich people and large corporations really ARE more important than everyone else? Because, you know, that's not democracy, is it.
