Reply #61: Rebuilding our infrastructure, for instance? We got a lot of ruined infrastructure post-Bush.

[Selatius]

Service personnel are people too, as you said. If the government is going to put unemployed people back to work rebuilding infrastructure and building a green economy, then it shouldn't matter if they were left unemployed by GM or the Pentagon. They both need food on the table and money for bills. I get that.

The problem is military spending, if allowed to grow out of control, can strangle an economy. The Soviet experience has shown the world what happens when too much resources go to the military: Economic stagnation.

If the goal is to cut defense spending by 50%, for instance, then I think the best approach would be through simple attrition over the course of years. Take in fewer personnel than personnel who are leaving through retirement or the end of their service commitment, but the point of national defense should and always be about defense only, not about jobs. You shouldn't spend on war just for war's sake; that's the road to insanity. I'll leave it to Eisenhower's words here:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. ... Is there no other way the world may live?"

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, Speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, "The Chance for Peace"