2 Nov

Tether

US Military Spending

This post by Stephen Semler is a welcome reminder of how insanely greedy the US Military Industrial Complex has become. The military in Burma or Pakistan can only dream of the influence of the US Military and their contractors. The scale of the spend has now become so large that any slowdown is probably impossible. The more that is spent, the more voters depend on that spend for their incomes. Military contractors are past masters at spreading the manufacturing jobs for a new piece of kit over all fifty-two states, thereby ensuring low efficiency of production, but oodles of political support.

The UK has nothing on this. It seems to me that ultimately this millstone of spending will push the USA off its perch as a global hegemon. It may not happen in my lifetime, but it is surely coming. All empires rot from the core, and this is possibly the start of the rot in the USA, although I fear that large parts of the corporate welfare state have already started to stink.

Of course, the press is co-opted to give cover for endlessly increasing spending. One common technique is to identify another Sputnik Moment at which China (or Russia) is claimed to be pulling ahead of the US in high-tech weaponry.

I’m not the only one thinking that the US Empire is in decline, Macro Ops thinks so too.