ashtually you haven't considered that the military industrial complex makes us all dependent on the bloodshed, on top of being complicit in it

I don't know if i should laugh or cry at that

"Providing jobs" as if jobs creating bombs to blow people to bits overseas is a good use of someone's labor.

In related news, I don’t have health insurance and my city is incapable of building a crosswalk on my street

Mom, can we have Keynesianism?

We have Keynesianism at home.

The Keynesianism at home:

when i travel around my community and see the acute sickness and poverty, the lack of support for housing families and programs to promote of public health, the diseases of despair and understaffed civic institutions unable to provide basic services, the overworked and underpaid social workers, the ever increasing economic barrier between young, competent people with energy and their dreams of higher education.... i know my first thought is:

i really hope we can make some improvements to US military infrastructure right now.

The liberals were always saying we were just giving Ukraine old shit that was going to get replaced so it's actually free. To which I always thought, the fact that we have all this unused shit around and it's enough to coast through an entire war in Ukraine means we spent too much money (the means through which the state requisitions resources, including labor) on military infrastructure in the past. We live in this shit hole country today with terrible infrastructure and literally don't have a health care system because our priorities have always been this dumb shit. Now, I guess it's time to replace all that old shit we gave away (it was free) and we have no choice but to continue prioritizing military infrastructure over health care, public housing, student loan forgiveness, everything. Because military infrastructure isn't cheap.

You see, I give myself my own money to make weapons for a stupid proxy war on the other side of the globe. And that's how the money helps me! My salary is infinite!

Every war is a banker's war. Except the class war if we ever start to fight back.

It's actually good that tax money goes to defense contractors.

Have you considered that Axie Infinity actually provides jobs for people in the Philipines? They get to play an NFT Pokemon knock-off for 8 hours a day while getting paid minimum wage, thus contributing to society in a meaningful way

After playing Helldivers 2 I can't help but read this and just... It's exactly the same. It sounds like Helldivers satire.

if you want to have a job guarantee program you can have it without the murder machine part. clearly the murder machine part is so the MIC benefits.

What do libs think will happen to these jobs once the war is done?

This. Is. An. Investment. In. Democracy.

Something I've thought about a lot in the last few years is kind of coming to a head now regarding Israel and Ukraine funding.

America doesn't produce basically anything. The one thing we do produce is war technology and, simply put, bombs. That is undoubtedly a huge part of our economy. The rest is all wrapped in what amounts to "bullshit" in the form of a financialized economy.

I've wondered if we could somehow force an actual end to the endless bomb making, would the US economy simply implode? Not trying to be dramatic, but seriously, assuming bombs weren't replaced with like steel production for new bridges and massive housing complexes and railroads and such. If we just ceased bomb production... I kinda feel like shit would come crashing down.

I guess the obvious way to work around that would be to send resources and funding from weapons manufacturing to stuff like steel production (probably gotta build new fucking factories... US literally doesn't have the means to produce our own commodities like that on a mass scale the way we did for WWII. What an absolute husk of a nation).

When I think about the potential ramifications from getting what I want, I feel this sort of dissonance. That's probably the best word for it. It's like I can see that destroying the US military industrial complex is objectively moral. And I can see that doing so would probably crash the US economy causing harm to people around me.

The liberal politicians, democrats, take alllllll the stuff off the table before the start button is pushed. There will not be efforts made to bring industry base back to the US. There won't be significant nationwide investments into infrastructure. Etc. for anything that would improve material conditions and offer productive labor to replace the war industry. Off the table! You get to choose: accept making weapons here and sending them around the world ie maintain the status quo ("nothing will fundamentally change"), or stop the arms production, put a stick in the spoke of the American economic engine, and crash the whole thing on top of your head. You will not have nice things! You can't! But you can make more bombs and maybe avoid that whole crashing down thing.

Kinda rambling, but that entire concept or whatever is why I, a burger, sort of instinctively understand that we cannot dismantle the US military industrial complex from the inside and definitely not through electoral means. Not to be doomer, because there are solutions and hope, but to be realistic that the US and first world will view peace and declining US empire as an existential threat... and perhaps in some ways that is correct from the viewpoint of Americans. That doesn't make it moral or the correct stance, obviously, but how many will remain principled in calling for total dismantling of the US military as conditions plummet to hell and still congress will always ignore or say no to anything at home to improve those conditions? Safe to say... not many. What a perfectly evil system that perpetuates itself.

You could employ as many people making fireworks. It'd be a bad use of money, and still better.

Wasn't this point made with Liz Warren's state? Like she could hypothetically be as progressive as can be, but a substantial portion of the jobs were for a naval dock

Ben Norton from Geopolitical Economy Report talks about how the EU is becoming a vassal to the US by de-industrializing itself, and how the US, in order to stabilize inflation is "creating jobs" by reindustrializing in the military sector. So it seems to me that the entire US-led contrivance of expanding NATO eastward past Russia's "red lines" (which began under Bush in 2008 to the chagrin of France and other NATO members) was always a deliberate effort to destabilize eastern Europe, and create more wars to profit from. Of course liberals will never absorb this information and will see everything in terms of the US being some kind of global forecfield protecting democracy from some vague illiberal "authoritarian despotism" and various brown/yellow perils they've dreamed up.

this must be the "bomb-enomics" I've heard about

"much-needed"