Re: “America, which is not big on state aid”?!!!
I’m not trivialising anything.
I’m pointing out that the USA spends 3.4% of GDP on its military, which is way more than most countries. It’s unarguable that all the money gets spent on *something*, and that something is not economically productive in a classical sense. It may or may not be money well-spent in the wider context.
To take a random point from your list, maintenance and upkeep of military buildings is both *necessary* (in context of the pre-decided size of the military), and is state aid to building contractors. Many of those building contractors would struggle to stay in business without the incredibly long-term predictable flows from the maintenance contracts.
Boeing is the same. Just how many new civilian airframes does anybody really need to design per decade? Boeing just can’t exist at all without steady military contracts. Ditto Airbus, this isn’t a comment about the USA. But surely we still want to have new airframes being developed.
Again, you’re misunderstanding what state aid actually is.
It’s *not* “government subsidising inefficient industries”.
A successful economy consists of companies living in an environment created by government spending. It’s exactly what Obama meant when he said “you didn’t build that”.
The US does a lot *more* of that, relatively speaking, than most other countries on the planet, rather than less as the libertarian myth would have it.
And China is overtaking the US economically, by doing still more.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
