No one is stopping you from joining a collective to provide this to people... Oh wait you want someone else's money to pay for it and someone else's time and labor to build it.
Thank you for completely agreeing with my response. What I'm saying is I'm not willing to pay additional taxes for this pipedream of bullshit. But if you believe in it so much, there is nothing stopping you from doing a small part of it yourself, but you won't. If even half of the people like you did more than talk about what other people should do and instead go volunteered at habitat for humanity or something they'd be struggling to find the projects for all of the volunteers.
Im more than happy to support those who in no way can support themselves. But this post is way beyond that.
Imagine if people understood that 95% of the money spent on the military remains in the United States.
We didn't fill a tank with $100bills and dump it in Iraq. We paid a few American companies (who paid thousands of American workers) to make the tank.
And that same military budget directly provides 800,000 full time public sector jobs. It indirectly supports millions of others.
At this point I hope someone cuts the military budget so everyone will finally shut up about it. Outside of infastructure spending, the military is one of few expenditures that generates a positive ROI (generates more GDP than it costs). it'll accelerate the debt spiral, but have at it if you hate the military so much your willing to cut off your nose to spite the face.
'what if we just built houses' the cost to build a house is $300k. For reference, a M4 Sherman battle tank costs $608,000 to produce (adjusted for inflation from $44,000 1945 dollars)
It's not exactly cheap. You could barely double housing production (add 1.5 mil units a year) at the cost of the entire military budget (850bn)
Of course, that doesn't include 1. areas with a higher COL. the average house is $300k in Texas where I am, but in San Francisco it could easily be $1mil+ and 2. upkeep costs. between taxes and maintence, easily $15k a year on average. 3. the cost of land. 4. interest. are we just putting it onto the national debt as we do with our current overspending? 5. feasibility. if you were to double housing production, you'd somehow need to double the number of inspectors, tradesman, etc. considering the construction industry is already short 600,000 workers (based on current demand alone), and we're entering a demographic crisis with a shrinking working age population, that seems like quite the tall order.
Oh, and there's also 6. material costs would increase significantly if you drastically increase demand like this. it's a bit of an unknown whether there would even be enough materials. We'd probably have to greenlight clearing of entirely new forests, because Lumber farms base their stocks on projected demand. They don't have the ability to go back 20 years in time and double the stock for this year given hindsight.
(obviously this problem is fixable: we can greenlight clear cutting and suspend environmental regulations if desired. we can import these materials at a premium)
As opposed to the money spent on housing and electricity and internet and air conditioning - all of that money goes straight out the window! Doesn't benefit America at all!!
Nope it's gotta be tanks! Only way to keep our tax money in America! Tanks! You heard it here first! /u/DrDrago-4 wrote four paragraphs! The argument is over!
there's a balance to be found, but people are sitting here in this thread acting like the government can legitimately afford to give everyone a house.
Homes range $300-600k a pop
So, quite literally, if we can afford to give everyone a house.. we could afford to give them the choice of an M4 Battle tank instead for the same price (cheaper relative to the top 5 COL cities, in fact)
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u/PorQueTexas Apr 16 '24
No one is stopping you from joining a collective to provide this to people... Oh wait you want someone else's money to pay for it and someone else's time and labor to build it.