Why do you feel the need to disparage the branch? Navy lost to Air Force weeks ago. In all seriousness there are plenty of deeply experienced personnel across the armed services that understand the strategic, operational, and tactical virtues of an independent Air Force.
A lot more complicated. It presumes a certain an automatic behavior on the part of businesses getting the tax cut - that they will automatically take the additional money and use it to boost national “supply” (increase supply, improve productivity, open more stores, develop new goods, etc.). In reality, businesses do lots of other things with the money - like deduce there are no business opportunities to expand and instead pay larger dividends to its shareholders.
Supply side tax cuts don’t magically change business conditions, so there is no guaranteed improved-supply effect of the tax cut.
There’s also the bad psychology it brings with it - a profound belief in the power of supply-side tax cuts seems to convince it adherents that spending isn’t a concern, i.e., there’s little need for spending discipline because we’ll just grow the economy, and therefore also the revenues to pay for the spending. That has been a very, very bad ancillary component to supply-side philosophy.
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Lol… Don’t take it personal, but you’ve obviously never served if you don’t understand the above… That’s not a knock on you. That’s just reality.
I’m not advocating for the wholesale abolition of the air power. I have already agreed that we should maintain air superiority.
I’m advocating for a consolidation of capabilities while maintaining air superiority. It should happen across all branches to reduce unnecessary infrastructure spend, but the Chair Force seemed the obvious example.
“You think flying an airplane is just sitting in chair and pushing buttons? Before you go and sell what you know to U.ni.ted Air.lines - you got to give 6 years of your life, Sweetpea.” USMC D.I. to prospective naval aviators in Officer & a Gentleman.
My F-16 buddy always says “Damn. I had to give almost 9 to sell it to Delta…”
Me “Cry me a river.”
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Cause they’re a buncha fuckin’ zipper-suited sungods amirite.
There is also almost certainly hysteresis and time delay built in.
I am going to do something I do not often do…Agree with Bis.
I get that consolidation could make sense in certain circumstances, but in the world of war and geo-politics, redundancy is actually a good thing. In IT, the closest you can get to ‘Always-Up’ is redundancy. Our military needs to be always up.
Establishing air dominance where the battle field is, is critical. Having quick strike and ground support is also important, but you don’t have that if the skys are not secured.
I think air dominance is particularly important in the uncertainly we live in right now.
It’s pretty likely in the next few years that events outside our border are going to dictate our actions. We will need to dominate the air and the Air Force is the best tool for that job.
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This is really about redundancy vs. efficiency, correct? When it comes to the military, I am for redundancy. I don’t think we should be needlessly inefficient, but we don’t want narrow down our points of failure.
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We already have redundancies of redundancies… Like I said earlier, we have 2 planes for every plan the Chinese and Russian’s have combined.
We can’t on the one hand, point out how dangerous the debt is or how out of control spending is, but on the other hand, refuse to look at the things we hold dear, like the military.
I’m all ears on other ways to reduce our unsustainable debt levels.
I am on the hesitant side too… Sorry, when it comes to the Military, too much of everything is just enough.
Really, really great post on the subject. It’s really not as simple as “trickle down economics doesn’t work” or “trickle down would just work if…”. I firmly believe the theory is sound, but it is complicated and you described it really well here.
Sometimes it’s not true, but a lot of times it’s true. Economies of scale matter too–the small guys are choked off by things that are minor inconveniences to giant chains. A lot of regulations have the idea of controlling “Big X” but they don’t–the armies of lawyers, lobbyists, marketing teams and research divisions etc keep Big X afloat while the small guys are pretty much choked to death why what was meant to be a good idea.
I will end up seconding this. I think there are a lot of ways the Air Force and all other service branches can be made more efficient and less wasteful, but consolidating is not one of them. Also, the USAF runs more space missions than NASA and covers more sat-comm, imaging, intelligence gathering ground than NASA with its capabilities.
Kansas is probably one of the few places where we can get some data out of this theory.
It ain’t going very well!
You need to cut services to match the cuts, but that becomes incredibly difficult to do as far as the federal budget is concerned when the big boys are social security and the military, both functionally speaking sacred cows.
I have no problems, ideologically speaking, with what the Republicans at the national level pay lip service to. But, practically speaking, going after the minor shit and not even mentioning the actual problem-makers is just pandering to your base at its finest imo.
If you actually want to tackle the budget, then fucking tackle the budget. If you want to actually deal with our country’s welfare infrastructure, then deal with the parts that actually matter.
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I believe that, at this point, offering amnesty to the illegal immigrants here and finding a way to stem the flow is the best choice of action.
The problem is that I really don’t see a way of stemming said flow, short of waging war against the drug cartels and generally the assholes who make life a living hell for the poor people of Central/South America or go down the, frankly, authoritarian and draconian methods I described.
Either that or legalize drugs in the U.S. such that the drug trade is no longer relevant.
At this point, I’m starting to believe that legalizing drugs and finding a way to maintain some control over it is the best possible option.
I doubt that legalizing drugs will lead to an explosion of use in such a fashion that it completely paralyzes society (though I fully admit that this can be fantasy-thinking on my part; I am aware that the opium trade damn near destroyed China back in the 19th century) and likely helps the following-
-Greatly reduces the prison population by getting rid of the offenders jailed for selling a tiny bit of marijuana.
-Gets rid of the large financial part of the drug cartels. Or possibly even legalizes it in a manner such that the cartels cannot actually exist in their current, violent, form.
-A starting point to get a grasp on the host of social problems that illegal drugs bring upon the U.S.
Food for thought.
Well, one of the key problems is that the dumbass did it all in one fell swoop. That is about as asinine as jacking the minimum wage from 7-15$ in one swoop.
The problem wasn’t even growth, it was complete lack of foresight which led to a massive budget shortfall, combined with complete inability to scale down spending–because of course, they did it all in one fell swoop in the midst of a rather uncertai. economy (here I refer to usmc’s excellent post elsewhere on the confounding factors that make valiating or disproving the theory difficult)
totally agree with this part, but its a political disaster waiting to happen
I’m inclined to agree with your assessment of what happened there, but I think that’s besides the point.
The point is that Republicans talk of the trickle-down theory as though cutting taxes on the wealthy will simply lead to economic growth as the wealthy spend the money.
That did not happen in Kansas. Afaik, the business scene did not boom. The wealthy did not spend money in such a fashion that the state economy benefited.
It is a repudiation of the basic concept behind the trickle-down theory.
NOW, if you were to argue that cutting taxes on the wealthy can be a part of a greater, detailed economic plan instead of being what amounts to a sound-bite, then I’m all ears.
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That’s a bullshit talking point Democrats use as sloganeering tactic and in no way representative of a true ideal republican budget. Anymore than simply saying democrats just want to tax and spend us out of existence.
Both want to generate more tax revenue, the conservative belief is that generally lower taxes increases taxing opportunities which will increase tax revenue. The liberal belief is that you extract as much money as possible from every taxing opportunity and hence increase tax revenue.
It’s like the difference between Honda and Ferrari. Ferrari makes way more money per car than Honda does, but Honda sells way more cars.
And just what do you consider “rich” anyway?
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