AMERICAN MILITARY SPENDING
Created | Updated Nov 12, 2012
But this whole idea of just how much better off the USA would be without arms spending has a long history, going back to the protests about having to help to pay the defence costs of the British Crown before 1776.. At the Fall of Communism I heard pious experts talking about the “Peace Dividend” that would allow the USA to spend much more money on improving society. But that did not seem to belong to the real world. The heavy levels of taxation that people had tolerated during the Cold War had been spent on two things (a) making sure that the USA had a credible deterrent even if MAD, and (b) short of war constantly promoting the “Happy Days” culture that took up the challenge thrown down by Mr. Khrushchev, to produce the happier condition of the common people. So the limited assistance that was given to the “poor” had been in part politically motivated.
In fact “The Peace Dividend” was spent largely in producing lower taxes in order to encourage industry, and crucially, the pursuit of wealth through the vast new opportunities that were opening up for US capital all over the world. The consequences were very well described in J.K. Galbraith’s “The Culture of Contentment”, the nineties get rich quick, corporatist culture which has actually brought us into the mess that we are now in- most recently with the current revelations over the incompetence of the BBC corporate structure in which people at the top have no real and effective knowledge of and/or control over what is actually done in their name- as long as the balance sheets show a healthy profit to the investors.
And in any case why spend money on the poor in a country that was founded on Puritan individualism and each man (and woman) ultimately standing alone before god and answerable for what they have done or not done. And the American Dream had come to be all about “The Affluent Society” so people having lots of money to show just what could be done with it would only serve to motivate the poor and disadvantaged.. But all this meant that the inalienable right to “The pursuit of happiness” was now just too ambitious, and Galbraith’s contentment related to happiness much as sexual relations relates to love. The lesser one can just be bought for money and the whole wealth culture tended to be of the ostentatious kind that often comes from quickly acquired and unearned wealth.. The “Bling’ culture in which rites of passage films frequently focussed on adolescents “slumming it” in various kinds of filth and showing off by having enough money-like their Pop Stars- to just trash places, as happened in the great Woodstock memorial.
So the big question for the USA and the West in general is ‘what of really world class does it produce in this new Millennium?- apart from the most sophisticated military technology in the world. Most of what Americans consume, it seems, can be made much more cheaply by robots and people working in economies where the workers have never had the advantages of workers in ‘the developed world’, who in turn (as in Harold Wilson’s Britain of his ‘Buy British’ campaign) are very happy to RECEIVE first world wages, but are reluctant to PAY them.
In fact “The Peace Dividend” was spent largely in producing lower taxes in order to encourage industry, and crucially, the pursuit of wealth through the vast new opportunities that were opening up for US capital all over the world. The consequences were very well described in J.K. Galbraith’s “The Culture of Contentment”, the nineties get rich quick, corporatist culture which has actually brought us into the mess that we are now in- most recently with the current revelations over the incompetence of the BBC corporate structure in which people at the top have no real and effective knowledge of and/or control over what is actually done in their name- as long as the balance sheets show a healthy profit to the investors.
And in any case why spend money on the poor in a country that was founded on Puritan individualism and each man (and woman) ultimately standing alone before god and answerable for what they have done or not done. And the American Dream had come to be all about “The Affluent Society” so people having lots of money to show just what could be done with it would only serve to motivate the poor and disadvantaged.. But all this meant that the inalienable right to “The pursuit of happiness” was now just too ambitious, and Galbraith’s contentment related to happiness much as sexual relations relates to love. The lesser one can just be bought for money and the whole wealth culture tended to be of the ostentatious kind that often comes from quickly acquired and unearned wealth.. The “Bling’ culture in which rites of passage films frequently focussed on adolescents “slumming it” in various kinds of filth and showing off by having enough money-like their Pop Stars- to just trash places, as happened in the great Woodstock memorial.
So the big question for the USA and the West in general is ‘what of really world class does it produce in this new Millennium?- apart from the most sophisticated military technology in the world. Most of what Americans consume, it seems, can be made much more cheaply by robots and people working in economies where the workers have never had the advantages of workers in ‘the developed world’, who in turn (as in Harold Wilson’s Britain of his ‘Buy British’ campaign) are very happy to RECEIVE first world wages, but are reluctant to PAY them.
