Summary
European officials are preparing a multibillion-dollar defense package to bolster regional security and support Ukraine, announced by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock at the Munich Security Conference.
The package, potentially valued up to 700 billion euros, will fund military training, arms deliveries, and security guarantees amid concerns over Russian aggression and diminishing U.S. contributions to NATO.
The move follows calls for Europe to boost its own defense spending while U.S.-Russian talks, which exclude Ukraine and Europe, on ending the Ukraine conflict continue.
In a way, it’s what I was hoping would happen. The US backs off its own defense spending and stops acting like the world police force. The flip side of that is that Europe and the rest of the world picks up their own defense.
What I had in mind as an end game is that the US would be at a table of equals. That’s not at all what this is.
Not saying it’s not the right thing to do, but I hope America is ready for the loss of jobs that will come with scaling back the military. There will be a lot of associated small businesses and stuff you wouldn’t have thought of that will also get defunded outside of direct military spending.
The answer to that is we pick it up in other ways, like universal health care or building schools, which would benefit the economy in other ways. There’s nothing special about military spending that makes it more effective at Keynesian economics than anything else. In fact, it’s probably worse.
Not that Keynesian economics was anything other than keeping capitalism going past its expiration date, of course.
Universal healthcare and building schools in this brave new America? They are killing off “woke” spending on renewables so I would not hold your breath for the former.
I think the reality is that new destitute communities will be created next to the former factories that used to supply the MIC.
Destitute communities come with a lot of political instability which probably has to be channeled into something, which despite what everyone’s been thinking so far, has sort of been, to mixed or poor success with basically every succeeding administration. The protests keep getting bigger, basically. You get a big or well-organized enough one of those, and then there’s a chance that you get something much more serious than chaz, or you get a politically galvanizing one-sided massacre, or something else to that effect.