The Military ruined this country

[jeff47]

108. I provided the link. The rental on those bases is in there.

Rentals come out of Operations and maintenance, with a little from Military Construction and Family Housing.

The only weapons systems not included in that budget are the nukes. They're under Department of Energy. But we're not building new ones so the R&D and procurement is relatively small.

The we spend 421 billion at Wal-mart doesn't make sense. Who are WE? Citizens spending money shopping, that's not included in GDP.

GDP is "the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time."

Wal-Mart sells final goods. By definition, they are being sold at market value. Whether or not their foreign-made goods are imports for the purposes of GDP depends on how exactly they're imported.

But most importantly, that number is present to provide a sense of scale. The money we spend on "building weapons" is half of what we spend at Wal-Mart. To claim our entire economy is built around "building weapons" is silly when a single retailer's receipts is twice as much money.

O yes, the argument that only the military could invent these great products.

Fact is the military did discover and/or "invent" those technologies. To claim private enterprise would have "figured it out" ignores the fact that private enterprise had no reason to research those technologies.

For example, companies really had no need for a computer network that can survive a nuclear strike. So private enterprise had no reason to invent the Internet. In fact, private enterprise invented several proprietary networks in the place of the Internet.

We are kicking China's ass. Only less so every single day.

Data doesn't support this conclusion. That's why I provided a link to it.

Yes, China has had some explosive growth recently. But they have a very, very long way to get to the US, and there's a lot of enormous problems between now and "beating" the US.

The best and brightest are working for McDonald Douglas or Raytheon. Good pay for drone designers.

No, they pay crap compared to Wall Street. Writing new programs for Wall Street is one or two orders of magnitude more money. Plus, there's not that many drones being designed compared to the number of "best and brightest".