this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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There's ample money for both. Conservatives just block it.
glancing at the F-35 $2T budget
At some point, you start making trade offs.
glancing at the voting records of Manchin, Sinema, and Coons
I wish it was just conservatives.
I stand by the money comment, there's zero indication there isn't money to complete both coastal hardening projects, and robust disaster relief.
I stand by the conservative comment because Manchin and the like are conservative in all but name. More directly, desantis and such openly avoid collaboration with the democratic white house out of spite
That's fine. But it isn't just a question of money. Its a question of expertise and manpower. At some point, you have a soft cap on the volume of intellectual and engineering man hours at your disposal. Funneling our best and brightest into a Pentagon vanity project means drawing down the pool of skilled workers in other industries.
It's the same problem modern mathematics and physics is having with the financials industry. Anyone who excels at high level mathematics gets sucked up to do HFT at some Wall Street hedge fund. They spend their best years combing over market data for optimizing arbitrage in regional commodities prices. The modern day Hawkings and Einsteins are very likely tied up inventing new ways to raid your pension funds, rather than spearheading the next generation of astronomy and physics.
In the same way, the trillions we spend on the F-35 are drawing people into a field that exists exclusively for the cat-and-mouse of perimeter intrusion. Meanwhile, civil engineering is a field for neo-babies looking for government sinecures and B-students who don't realize they're getting into a retreating field.
Conservatives-in-all-but-Name are a big chunk of the party. Manchin isn't the exception in the Senate, he's just the name we all recognize. Gillibrand and Hickenlooper and Ossoff and Durbin and King and Tester and on and on... they're all along for the ride.
DeSantis is a freak on social issues. But on fiscal austerity and "business-friendly" subsidies, he's right in line with the Dems in his state's congressional delegation.
I agree with much of your comment but must say I feel you moved the goalposts a bit from raw funds to expertise and manpower. I understand your draw argument, but would contend that it's not that overlapped a Venn diagram. There aren't that many aerospace engineer / civil engineer hybrids that you're losing staff from one to the other.