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▲ dgellow 3 hours ago

The US doesn’t lack the capital for welfare. The country decides to instead waste its resources fighting wars, fighting its allies, fighting its trade partners. The money is here, there is no will to allocate it to welfare. You could reduce the number of people on welfare by a massive amount and none of the savings from that would get distributed to the remaining recipient

▲ 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]
[deleted]
▲voidfunc 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Those wars are essential to protecting our economic interests. An isolationist US is impossible. We're pretty much a modern imperial power.

▲0xDEAFBEAD 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The US economy did great prior to 1900 or so. During this period, we did not have significant military action outside of the Americas, and we avoided peacetime alliances. From 1820-1900 the US economy exploded from about 40% the size of the UK economy to about 200% the size of the UK economy.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-maddison-project-data...

Switzerland has a per capita GDP exceeding the US while pursuing isolationist foreign policy. They are the world's most popular country in opinion polls.

▲voidfunc 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I hate to break it to you, but the world of pre-1900 has been dead and gone for a solid 120+ years, it was killed off by Europe getting itself into two stupid wars that the Americans had to come over and save them from. Nothing works the same anymore.

All those European countries get to invest in those nice social programs and isolationism because the US has at least up until now acted as world police and handled their foreign affairs for the most part.

▲0xDEAFBEAD 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Why shouldn't we let Europe do the world policing for a while? They're always complaining about whatever we do.

▲FpUser 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>"Those wars are essential to protecting our economic interests"

Translation - we bomb people for money. well thanks for being frank anyways. otherwise it is sick to hear all that moralizing about "us being a good guys"

▲kmeisthax 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, they're essential to protecting Benjamin Netanyahu's ass. No more and no less.

Less vindictively, the only economic interest the US has in the Middle East is oil. Relying on oil for your energy needs is, in 2026, a choice and not a requirement. Wind, solar, and the batteries you need to store them are continuously getting cheaper. And for the people who are net consumers of energy - primarily the US, Europe, and China - renewables are better for everything, but especially they're better for energy independence!

The only things that require oil are airplanes, plastics, and industrial chemical processes (like we make asphalt out of oil and certain inks out of naphtha). Eliminating most of the energy demand for oil would mean a significantly reduced dependence on foreign oil, and more specifically, the political dependence on low gas prices. America rebuilt all its cities in the image of the car and, as a result, made gasoline/petrol a necessary ingredient of urban mobility. This was, again, a choice - we absolutely could have retained and grown our dense urban cores and we can still rebuild what was destroyed.

But this requires an entire governing body at every level that is not a corpse paraded by the ghosts of Tammany Hall, Standard Oil, and Hitler. The primary crisis in America that is driving these wars is a fundamental lack of political will for alternatives.

▲0xDEAFBEAD 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The US is now the world's top oil exporter thanks to fracking:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels?fuel=oil&met...

▲TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Then why is gas so expensive?

▲themaninthedark 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Because we are keeping all the other dealers out...

▲kjs3 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Because more money is made exporting it? You didn't think this was about you, did you?