Antarctic Ice Increasing

[rambot]

And as for the "certainly see some attacks"....
i have no idea how you'd come to that conclusion. An act of war on US territory would be very inadvisable.

I agree 100%. Perhaps I misunderstood your previous point.
I understood this: "and the desire to take us down is inevitable." to refer to war/incursion/attack etc.

But it's not even close to first in relative spending (percentage of GDP, that is).

That surprised me.

That's true. OF course, many of those countries have a GDP that is 1-5% of the American figure. I think comparing American relative spending to a country like Oman, is like comparing apples to used kleenex.

 

[Naraoia]

Well, no, comparing absolute spending is more misleading. The US is a big country with a big GDP, it simply can spend an awful lot of money on the military (disregarding the even bigger national debt for a moment).

The best comparison would be, I think, between countries with a similar GDP (or population?), because if Oman and the US are not comparable in relative terms, they are even less comparable in absolute terms.

 

[rambot]

Well, no, comparing absolute spending is more misleading. The US is a big country with a big GDP, it simply can spend an awful lot of money on the military (disregarding the even bigger national debt for a moment).

The best comparison would be, I think, between countries with a similar GDP (or population?), because if Oman and the US are not comparable in relative terms, they are even less comparable in absolute terms.

Agreed. But America also far outspends any country with moderately comparable GDPs in terms of their defense spending or populations (double India that has 3.5x the population; almost treble that of china with a population 4x as great).

And to extend the point, American can spend a lot of money on defense. OR, it could spend a lot of money on education, health care or doing something that would directly benefit the citizens of the country. For some reason, the government continues to put more money into military contracts than their children.

 

[JWNEWMAN]

I'm not convinced global warming is a reality, however, I'm in favor of clean renewable energy. It makes no sense to pollute our environment. We have technologies whereby we could replace petrol.

Seems to me the tragedy in these types of debates is the way people demonize those who don't agree with their opinion. All that does is polarize. Besides not contributing any value to the dialogue harsh or denigrating criticism of an opposing opinion does nothing to elevate knowledge or educate.

 

[Vermithrax]

The amount America spends on defense is mostly useless. It focuses on high-tech equipment that really isn't worth the using. After all, they just dismantled the F-117 fleet. Far better to spend money on personnel and training and re-activate their mothballed equipment if the US really wants to deal with global threats, rather than useless projects like the F-22, the F-35, the XM-25, the Future Warrior program, the Osprey etc.