Do we trust the denominator of all these GDP calculations? How much is in there for our vast, off-the-books cash economy? Every landscaping company, family owned restaurant, framing carpenter, roofer, cocaine suppliers…(I could go on forever)?
Greenland is big and boring. No good golf courses. Many people on anti-depressants.
Here’s an idea to tumble Putin out of office: hire the Israelis (they’re good at this stuff) to come up with a software worm that invades the process control computers of Russia’s vodka producers. Crash production on a random basis for several months and see how happy people are. This is more useful than paying mucho euros to house thousands of military families near Frankfurt. Or wasting billions building bigger “Space Bases” in Greenland.
Exactly. There’s an article in the newspaper of record today detailing the evisceration of the British NGO, Stonewall. The lobbying group, dedicated to advocating the gay agenda, is cutting its staff of 114 in half. The reason? Trump’s cuts to USAid.
So, not only are we paying for Europe’s defense, we’re paying for its offense as well.
As Steve memorably put it, there’s no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than bad things.
Among the nicest things in the world is getting the US taxpayer to fund your destructive NGO.
Steve takes Trump literally but not seriously. That's why Steve is so perplexed about US politics in 2024. Who in their right mind could possibly vote for Blonaldolf Drumpfler? He wants to give away Europe to Russia, which is just a big dumb country. Those 77.3 million other Americans are morons.
You should expand on this. For about 5 years now, Mearsheimer has been saying in every interview that there's no evidence Putin has interest in Europe other than trade. In that entire time, I'm naware of any government representative, scholar or former deep-stater who's explicitly challenged that discrete point. So why is Steve here handwaving about the obviousness of his imperial dedigns on Eurooe? Is he just funnin' us?
If Europe is so great a continent, perhaps it can muster up the will and the funds to defend itself.
As for the Ukraine, the bribes they spread so widely in the west would have been better spent in Moscow. Better value for money to be had.
It’s interesting to see the thirties replayed, this time featuring the excoriation of Russia in Europe and that of China in the Pacific. Interesting, but depressing.
If Europe stepped up and spent more on defense they would have to cut funding to their welfare states and cut back on funds for the Muslim refugees. If they did that, they wouldn't be Europe- limp, supine, addicted to six weeks of vacation and "free" health care.
Bismarck managed to have a strong military and a robust social welfare system. That was over a century ago of course.
Switzerland mandates four weeks vacation, but increases it to five weeks if you’re under 20. They have supremely defensible terrain, but they’re also very serious about national defense. They don’t have any state-provided medical care either.
I don’t really care if Europe is supine. The Russians have zero interest in ruling over the French or Germans.
As long as Ukraine is kept out of NATO, I believe Russia will not go any further into Ukraine that is not ethnically Russian. And yes, Russia doesn't want to rule Germany, France or even Poland.
When Steve writes of the US abandoning Europe to the Russians I am reminded of all the other times in history when European complacency led to Russia invading them...like...uh...WWII (they might have been provoked that time but all the other no times they invaded?)
I'm all for lowering defense spending drastically but how does the Trump Administration square that with the appropriation process in Congress? We still have three branches of the federal government and the Congress holds the purse strings. If Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell push through an $850 billion defense budget, will Trump just try to impound funds? Nixon did impound appropriated money but Congress passed an Impoundment Act in 1974 that severely limited the president's impoundment power. The politically crippled President Nixon signed the Impoundment Act before his presidency crashed and burned. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to use impoundment in 1801 so impoundment has a history.
I don't think we should put much faith in Iranian, Russian or Chinese defence spending figures, much spending in all three places goes through incredibly opaque government linked companies.
There is also lots of evidence that authoritarian regimes lie about the denominator: Total GDP.
"But several other people object that although the Western press made a big deal about Chinese ghost cities a few years ago, it mostly just took a couple of years for people to move in, and now at least some of them seem to be thriving. For example, Michael quotes the Wikipedia article, Under-occupied Developments In China:
Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities".
Ash Lael writes:
I'm sceptical of the Chinese "ghost city" phenomenon. I haven't explored the issue rigorously but my impression is that in areas that were previously dismissed as "ghost cities" like Ordos Kangbashi, the population is now large and growing.
I think we in the west are so used to infrastructure bottlenecks and short sightedness and anti-construction policies that the idea of it being possible to build the housing and infrastructure to accomodate expected demand ten years in the future is completely foreign to us. Perhaps building brand new cities before they are even needed is what the YIMBY utopia looks like."
Couple thoughts on this. First of all, our infrastructure is way more like China's than we'd care to admit. We use zoning, which is where a centralized government plans out exactly how and what people can build. Secondly, our highways cut right through our cities, destroying them to prioritize moving goods and GDP. Thirdly, our roads are way overbuilt, because government tries to anticipate what people will need years from now.
Beyond that, ghost towns are just an example. How can we accurate price anything in a Communist country when there entire philosophy of existence is to prevent that from happening.
Defense spending as a percentage of gdp is practically worthless when comparing across countries as each country has different security requirements and delusions of grandeur. It can be a useful when looking at time series data assuming the data is correct.
Some European nations buy some of our aircraft. Armor, artillery, ships, small arms? Mostly European designed and manufactured. I’m not certain about missiles, but I know the US uses at least some European anti-tank stuff.
Helicopters and transport aircraft are becoming more European.
I’m no longer very up on the subject, but do you have different info than this?
Trump's first term was a success because he "spoke loudly". He didn't do much, but it worked out, because with his speeches he let Americans know it's okay to want to have a country. Not only did that change America but it led to Bolsonaro and Milei. But the flip side of that is when he speaks loudly--even if it's a negotiating tactic--to say perverse things like Russia are the good guys and Ukraine are the bad guys it could have it's own dangerous effect. Then he talks about taking Canada and Greenland which is globalism just maybe his own version which sure is smarter than the version of globalism where we nation build Afghanistan.
I believe the cuts Hegseth requested are not necessarily reductions in total defense spending but a redirection from activities that are not critical or bloated to other national defense priorities. This seems to be a totally rational thing to do IMO, as bureaucratic inertia undoubtedly means that vast amounts of money are being thrown away on things just because that's what they have always done, and this includes where we deploy people and resources.
Payments on the national debt are now our 3rd largest cost and exceeds defense spending. Painful to admit it may be, but we are going to have to accept reductions in a lot of areas to drive down our rate of borrowing, and it's better to be intentional about it rather than have it forced on us. I feel like a lot of people are stuck in a 20th century mindset when there wasn't anything we couldn't do or afford, but those days are over.
I was lucky to live and work there for many years, and I especially appreciated the well-established permanence of Europe versus the Americas. It looks finished…and built to last. Even the things that didn’t last look good. (The Parthenon or Rome’s coliseum?)
Meanwhile, here at home, we build another Dollar Store.
Unfortunately, demographics determines destiny, and when having and raising babies went out of fashion, they chose unmanaged immigration to fill the void and pay for all the lovely permanence.
If your immigration policy is producing neighborhoods filled with angry people demanding Sharia law, perhaps it’s time for an adjustment to that policy?
The charitable view is that this is all an effort to panic the Europeans into taking their own defense seriously (thus allowing us to focus on China - we've apparently also discouraged NATO allies from sending warships on "pointless gesture" tours around Asia), while the putative "budget cuts" are a managerial exercise to root out stuff we spend lots of money on but don't really need, or are overpaying for.
The uncharitable view is that Trump & Co have no idea what they are doing. That's certainly a popular angle, but when one considers the actual results produced by the ostensibly professional, disciplined Biden years...
"Why concede Europe to Russia, a big dumb country?"
Why assume Russia is going to conquer Europe? How does that even happen?
Europe's next wars will be civil as their governments lose legitimacy and they're overrun with Arabs and Africans who don't share Steve's Atlanticist views. How do I know they're losing legitimacy? Because they're trying to ban political parties and outlawing criticism of themselves.
If you're not going to cut Medicare or Social Security then the military is the next low-hanging fruit. As some on this thread have already pointed out it's not the bucks but the bang for the bucks. We're not going to war with Russia or China over anthing less than an invasion of US territory and everyone knows it. The three countries that matter will just have to get along; none of us have millions of 95+ IQ young men to feed into another meatgrinder war.
I'm not great at history but I can't remember the last time Russia invaded Europe without some European Yahoo invading Russia first. According to Peter Zeihan Russia doesn't exactly have favorable demographics. Who would they even send to invade Europe?
I read a comment somewhere that claimed 70% of the PLA were only children. Russia and Ukraine probably have similar stats. For that matter, here at home we have fewer Anglo-Celts who have historically been our military's effective and supremely badass speartip.
These debates over Atlanticist foreign policy are fun but they end in another generation when the US tips majority non-white around 2040. The future US majority's ancestry traces to countries that were bystanders to World War Two and Europe is not on the good side of their anti-colonialist founding narrative (which begins in 1965). The question of what to do about China or Russia will be as alien and distant as what to do about the Spanish Imperial menace in the Caribbean.
How sure are we that the US will even be around in its current iteration by 2040? There's a good argument for destroying the nukes now before the future Latino/Afro-Caribbean governing majority gets a hold of them.
Has Trump threatened to invade Canada or Greenland? I know that's the freakout assumption by the TDS folks but I thought he was just musing about Canada becoming a state as kind of a dig at them, and that he wanted to buy Greenland. Peter Zeihan has some kind of reasoning based on population trends and the US desire to stop being the global hegemon that means we will end up in a rich well positioned western hemisphere with lots of mexican manufacturing while the Europeans and Chinese are fucked by their demographics.
Frankly, I think that dude makes a lot of assumptions about every other factor (aside from demographics) remaining static and also that all people are equivalent as resources. Still he makes some sense on us retreating a bit and offshoring in our own hemisphere in preference to China.
Weren’t you a busy beaver. Interesting stuff.
Do we trust the denominator of all these GDP calculations? How much is in there for our vast, off-the-books cash economy? Every landscaping company, family owned restaurant, framing carpenter, roofer, cocaine suppliers…(I could go on forever)?
Greenland is big and boring. No good golf courses. Many people on anti-depressants.
Here’s an idea to tumble Putin out of office: hire the Israelis (they’re good at this stuff) to come up with a software worm that invades the process control computers of Russia’s vodka producers. Crash production on a random basis for several months and see how happy people are. This is more useful than paying mucho euros to house thousands of military families near Frankfurt. Or wasting billions building bigger “Space Bases” in Greenland.
Trump has good instincts. Steve, you sound like someone who is tired of winning.
Exactly. There’s an article in the newspaper of record today detailing the evisceration of the British NGO, Stonewall. The lobbying group, dedicated to advocating the gay agenda, is cutting its staff of 114 in half. The reason? Trump’s cuts to USAid.
So, not only are we paying for Europe’s defense, we’re paying for its offense as well.
As Steve memorably put it, there’s no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than bad things.
Among the nicest things in the world is getting the US taxpayer to fund your destructive NGO.
I think Steve would agree but he’s trying to fair and give the other side equal consideration. He fails to grasp that he should just lie back and….win
Steve takes Trump literally but not seriously. That's why Steve is so perplexed about US politics in 2024. Who in their right mind could possibly vote for Blonaldolf Drumpfler? He wants to give away Europe to Russia, which is just a big dumb country. Those 77.3 million other Americans are morons.
You should expand on this. For about 5 years now, Mearsheimer has been saying in every interview that there's no evidence Putin has interest in Europe other than trade. In that entire time, I'm naware of any government representative, scholar or former deep-stater who's explicitly challenged that discrete point. So why is Steve here handwaving about the obviousness of his imperial dedigns on Eurooe? Is he just funnin' us?
If Europe is so great a continent, perhaps it can muster up the will and the funds to defend itself.
As for the Ukraine, the bribes they spread so widely in the west would have been better spent in Moscow. Better value for money to be had.
It’s interesting to see the thirties replayed, this time featuring the excoriation of Russia in Europe and that of China in the Pacific. Interesting, but depressing.
If Europe stepped up and spent more on defense they would have to cut funding to their welfare states and cut back on funds for the Muslim refugees. If they did that, they wouldn't be Europe- limp, supine, addicted to six weeks of vacation and "free" health care.
Bismarck managed to have a strong military and a robust social welfare system. That was over a century ago of course.
Switzerland mandates four weeks vacation, but increases it to five weeks if you’re under 20. They have supremely defensible terrain, but they’re also very serious about national defense. They don’t have any state-provided medical care either.
I don’t really care if Europe is supine. The Russians have zero interest in ruling over the French or Germans.
As long as Ukraine is kept out of NATO, I believe Russia will not go any further into Ukraine that is not ethnically Russian. And yes, Russia doesn't want to rule Germany, France or even Poland.
When Steve writes of the US abandoning Europe to the Russians I am reminded of all the other times in history when European complacency led to Russia invading them...like...uh...WWII (they might have been provoked that time but all the other no times they invaded?)
The greatest risk to Europe is European security competition. The purpose of NATO (unstated) is to prevent European re-armerment.
If WW-1 was like a European civil war, they had a do over in 20 years. No one in the US much wanted a do over of its civil war.
Couldn’t we replace much of our navy with unmanned, underwater naval drones?
Come on, Elon. Pick up the pace.
We should replace it with some Surface to Surface missile batteries.
'unmanned'? That's pretty cisheteronormative talk for the military.
No, you actually couldn't. Not for a longtime.
I'm all for lowering defense spending drastically but how does the Trump Administration square that with the appropriation process in Congress? We still have three branches of the federal government and the Congress holds the purse strings. If Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell push through an $850 billion defense budget, will Trump just try to impound funds? Nixon did impound appropriated money but Congress passed an Impoundment Act in 1974 that severely limited the president's impoundment power. The politically crippled President Nixon signed the Impoundment Act before his presidency crashed and burned. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to use impoundment in 1801 so impoundment has a history.
I don't think we should put much faith in Iranian, Russian or Chinese defence spending figures, much spending in all three places goes through incredibly opaque government linked companies.
There is also lots of evidence that authoritarian regimes lie about the denominator: Total GDP.
Authoritarian governments always lie. So do leftist governments.
GDP is reasonably reliably estimated across countries.
The effectiveness of the numerator is more relevant. For example Arab countries all have militaries but have never won a war.
I am thinking of this paper
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/720458?journalCode=jpe
I don't think the spending on militaries is less real in the Arab World, they are just less effective at using it.
If China's GDP is a trillion dollars, but 100 billion of that is spent building a ghost town that no one lives in, what is their true gdp?
Scott Alexander looked into them.
"But several other people object that although the Western press made a big deal about Chinese ghost cities a few years ago, it mostly just took a couple of years for people to move in, and now at least some of them seem to be thriving. For example, Michael quotes the Wikipedia article, Under-occupied Developments In China:
Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities".
Ash Lael writes:
I'm sceptical of the Chinese "ghost city" phenomenon. I haven't explored the issue rigorously but my impression is that in areas that were previously dismissed as "ghost cities" like Ordos Kangbashi, the population is now large and growing.
I think we in the west are so used to infrastructure bottlenecks and short sightedness and anti-construction policies that the idea of it being possible to build the housing and infrastructure to accomodate expected demand ten years in the future is completely foreign to us. Perhaps building brand new cities before they are even needed is what the YIMBY utopia looks like."
From here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-housing
I don't think they are much of an issue.
Couple thoughts on this. First of all, our infrastructure is way more like China's than we'd care to admit. We use zoning, which is where a centralized government plans out exactly how and what people can build. Secondly, our highways cut right through our cities, destroying them to prioritize moving goods and GDP. Thirdly, our roads are way overbuilt, because government tries to anticipate what people will need years from now.
Beyond that, ghost towns are just an example. How can we accurate price anything in a Communist country when there entire philosophy of existence is to prevent that from happening.
Roads overbuilt? I’m doubtful. Undermaintained? Of that I’m sure.
Defense spending as a percentage of gdp is practically worthless when comparing across countries as each country has different security requirements and delusions of grandeur. It can be a useful when looking at time series data assuming the data is correct.
Europe for sure free rides on the US for defence but Europe is a very good customer of the US defence industry.
The US itself free rides economically on the rest of the world as the issuer of the global reserve currency (“exorbitant privilege”, etc).
There are all sorts of other “grand bargain” type analogies you could make about the Pax Americana that has lasted Donald Trump’s entire lifetime.
Does he realise this? Does he care? I don’t know either.
Some European nations buy some of our aircraft. Armor, artillery, ships, small arms? Mostly European designed and manufactured. I’m not certain about missiles, but I know the US uses at least some European anti-tank stuff.
Helicopters and transport aircraft are becoming more European.
I’m no longer very up on the subject, but do you have different info than this?
Trump's first term was a success because he "spoke loudly". He didn't do much, but it worked out, because with his speeches he let Americans know it's okay to want to have a country. Not only did that change America but it led to Bolsonaro and Milei. But the flip side of that is when he speaks loudly--even if it's a negotiating tactic--to say perverse things like Russia are the good guys and Ukraine are the bad guys it could have it's own dangerous effect. Then he talks about taking Canada and Greenland which is globalism just maybe his own version which sure is smarter than the version of globalism where we nation build Afghanistan.
I believe the cuts Hegseth requested are not necessarily reductions in total defense spending but a redirection from activities that are not critical or bloated to other national defense priorities. This seems to be a totally rational thing to do IMO, as bureaucratic inertia undoubtedly means that vast amounts of money are being thrown away on things just because that's what they have always done, and this includes where we deploy people and resources.
Payments on the national debt are now our 3rd largest cost and exceeds defense spending. Painful to admit it may be, but we are going to have to accept reductions in a lot of areas to drive down our rate of borrowing, and it's better to be intentional about it rather than have it forced on us. I feel like a lot of people are stuck in a 20th century mindset when there wasn't anything we couldn't do or afford, but those days are over.
Europe really is great.
I was lucky to live and work there for many years, and I especially appreciated the well-established permanence of Europe versus the Americas. It looks finished…and built to last. Even the things that didn’t last look good. (The Parthenon or Rome’s coliseum?)
Meanwhile, here at home, we build another Dollar Store.
Unfortunately, demographics determines destiny, and when having and raising babies went out of fashion, they chose unmanaged immigration to fill the void and pay for all the lovely permanence.
If your immigration policy is producing neighborhoods filled with angry people demanding Sharia law, perhaps it’s time for an adjustment to that policy?
Nah, it'll be fine
--The Critical Drinker
The charitable view is that this is all an effort to panic the Europeans into taking their own defense seriously (thus allowing us to focus on China - we've apparently also discouraged NATO allies from sending warships on "pointless gesture" tours around Asia), while the putative "budget cuts" are a managerial exercise to root out stuff we spend lots of money on but don't really need, or are overpaying for.
The uncharitable view is that Trump & Co have no idea what they are doing. That's certainly a popular angle, but when one considers the actual results produced by the ostensibly professional, disciplined Biden years...
"Why concede Europe to Russia, a big dumb country?"
Why assume Russia is going to conquer Europe? How does that even happen?
Europe's next wars will be civil as their governments lose legitimacy and they're overrun with Arabs and Africans who don't share Steve's Atlanticist views. How do I know they're losing legitimacy? Because they're trying to ban political parties and outlawing criticism of themselves.
If you're not going to cut Medicare or Social Security then the military is the next low-hanging fruit. As some on this thread have already pointed out it's not the bucks but the bang for the bucks. We're not going to war with Russia or China over anthing less than an invasion of US territory and everyone knows it. The three countries that matter will just have to get along; none of us have millions of 95+ IQ young men to feed into another meatgrinder war.
I'm not great at history but I can't remember the last time Russia invaded Europe without some European Yahoo invading Russia first. According to Peter Zeihan Russia doesn't exactly have favorable demographics. Who would they even send to invade Europe?
I read a comment somewhere that claimed 70% of the PLA were only children. Russia and Ukraine probably have similar stats. For that matter, here at home we have fewer Anglo-Celts who have historically been our military's effective and supremely badass speartip.
These debates over Atlanticist foreign policy are fun but they end in another generation when the US tips majority non-white around 2040. The future US majority's ancestry traces to countries that were bystanders to World War Two and Europe is not on the good side of their anti-colonialist founding narrative (which begins in 1965). The question of what to do about China or Russia will be as alien and distant as what to do about the Spanish Imperial menace in the Caribbean.
How sure are we that the US will even be around in its current iteration by 2040? There's a good argument for destroying the nukes now before the future Latino/Afro-Caribbean governing majority gets a hold of them.
Has Trump threatened to invade Canada or Greenland? I know that's the freakout assumption by the TDS folks but I thought he was just musing about Canada becoming a state as kind of a dig at them, and that he wanted to buy Greenland. Peter Zeihan has some kind of reasoning based on population trends and the US desire to stop being the global hegemon that means we will end up in a rich well positioned western hemisphere with lots of mexican manufacturing while the Europeans and Chinese are fucked by their demographics.
Frankly, I think that dude makes a lot of assumptions about every other factor (aside from demographics) remaining static and also that all people are equivalent as resources. Still he makes some sense on us retreating a bit and offshoring in our own hemisphere in preference to China.
“The only natural resources that are actually valuable are oil/gas and human beings with average IQs over 95.” Harsh but true.
My idea is a Palestinian buffer state between Russia and Ukraine. They all deserve each other as neighbors.