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How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan

reuters.com

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Re: How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan

#51

Post by gervase »

mrb wrote: post #20

Half the comments in HN are flagged or downvoted. Is it a sign that the HN crowd feels uneasy and divided about China's rising power? Meta comment: wonder if my comment will get downvoted too when it's just asking a question meant to start an intelligent discussion.

HN intentionally flags and removes controversial comments and posts, with the intention to prevent trolling, flame wars, and other detrimental behavior patterns. This is considered a feature, not a bug [0].

This ensures that HN provides a semi-curated discussion weighted towards technical and scientific issues, and against geopolitical or socioeconomic topics, for example.

That isn't a statement that these topics shouldn't be discussed, just that they aren't necessarily appropriate for discussion here.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan

#52

Post by rexpop »

gervase wrote: post #51
mrb wrote: post #20

Half the comments in HN are flagged or downvoted. Is it a sign that the HN crowd feels uneasy and divided about China's rising power? Meta comment: wonder if my comment will get downvoted too when it's just asking a question meant to start an intelligent discussion.

HN intentionally flags and removes controversial comments and posts, with the intention to prevent trolling, flame wars, and other detrimental behavior patterns. This is considered a feature, not a bug [0]. This ensures that HN provides a semi-curated discussion weighted towards technical and scientific issues, and against geopolitical or socioeconomic topics, for example. That isn't a statement that these topics sho…

> HN intentionally flags and removes

You mean, the forum software itself? Who wrote the algorithm?

Re: How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan

#53

Post by rayiner »

avar wrote: post #48
rayiner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both "federal" and "discretionary" are weasel qualifiers that attempt to make military spending look artificially large. For one thing, defense is one of the relatively few things the federal government is supposed to be doing--you would expect defense to account for a disproportionately large fraction of "federal" expenditures. (And it makes for misleading comparisons to countries with unified governments, where mil…

> "federal" and "discretionary" are weasel qualifiers that attempt to make military spending look artificially large[...] It's not just a weasel qualifier. There is mandatory military spending in the US, e.g. pensions paid to retired members of the military. Considering pensions paid to veterans a part of military spending is the norm, e.g. NATO's % GDP numbers take that into account for all its members. > For one th…

> It's not just a weasel qualifier. There is mandatory military spending in the US, e.g. pensions paid to retired members of the military.

So? When you're talking about how the military budget is too big, how does it make sense to exclude all the mandatory social spending from the calculation?

> Sure, but the extent to which it does it is largely discretionary.

That's not the point. Because defense is one of the few things the federal government is supposed to do, looking only at the federal budget will always make defense spending seem artificially large. You see people say stuff like "the U.S. spends more on defense than education!" In fact, we spend more on K-12 alone than defense--it's just that the education spending shows up in the $3.5 trillion of non-federal spending. We spend almost as much on infrastructure as on the military, a fact that is again obscured if you're looking only at the federal budget.

Re: How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan

#54

Post by NTDF9 »

jayd16 wrote: post #46
NTDF9 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is there an acceptance that the exceptionalism cannot be had by massive global bullying, wars, lack of investment in people vs corporations? I mean, its literally impossible to be number 1, if the competition is investing in their people and aren't going to insane wars. America is still number 2 and that's not a bad place.

You say that but quality of life is still considered considerably higher in the US than China. Even if the trajectory looks good, as more of China moves to a middle class lifestyle, the growth that's fueled by cheap labor will slow.

Sure. But I don't know what's better.

A life of $10/day with dirt cheap healthcare or a life of $60/day with the constant fear of losing healthcare.

This is why PPP comparison matters.

Re: How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan

#55

Post by Hillsborough »

DavidHm wrote: post #3
deepVoid wrote: post #2

It is long overdue. China has 1.3B people and the second largest economy in the world. It is righteous for them to be Asia's military titan.

I am not sure whether anyone being a military titan can be defined as "righteous", but its definitely been something that was going to happen sooner rather than later.

x

Re: How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan

#56

Post by terryschiavo22 »

landryraccoon wrote: post #26
terryschiavo22 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be clear. Being the world's military titan is not a desirable job. Someone has to fend off the Somali pirates, but it's not glamorous and everyone benefits equally from it (as in not just the US).

I don’t get it. Why is any of this true? If this is true, why doesn’t the US also take in refugees from all over the world, and take over building schools or doing more humanitarian aid as well? What exactly is the moral principle that “someone” has to do these things, and why does that “someone” have to be the US?

If no one fights off the Somali pirates, then no one can sail their shipping boats through those passages, and the US turns a net profit by fending off the Somali pirates because no one else can/will do it. That said, it still sucks that we're the ones that have to do it.

Re: How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan

#57

Post by avar »

rayiner wrote: post #53
avar wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "federal" and "discretionary" are weasel qualifiers that attempt to make military spending look artificially large[...] It's not just a weasel qualifier. There is mandatory military spending in the US, e.g. pensions paid to retired members of the military. Considering pensions paid to veterans a part of military spending is the norm, e.g. NATO's % GDP numbers take that into account for all its members. > For one th…

> It's not just a weasel qualifier. There is mandatory military spending in the US, e.g. pensions paid to retired members of the military. So? When you're talking about how the military budget is too big, how does it make sense to exclude all the mandatory social spending from the calculation? > Sure, but the extent to which it does it is largely discretionary. That's not the point. Because defense is one of the few…

I wasn't trying to refute your larger point that quoting some arbitrary part of a government's total % of GDP spending is mostly meaningless.

I was saying that your claim that "discretionary" in "discretionary military spending" is a weasel qualifier is wrong, because that part of the budget is meaningfully broken down into discretionary and non-discretionary spending. You can decide to scale active military personnel up and down, you can't (as easily) decide to stop paying military pensions.

> [...]defense is one of the few things the federal government is supposed to do[...]

So you keep saying, but the upthread comment is clearly about how much is being spent on that topic. Just because there's a law saying a certain part of the government is entrusted with a given task doesn't mean it's not meaningful to discuss how much needs to be spent on that task.

Re: How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan

#58

Post by harryh »

JamesBarney wrote: post #47
rayiner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both "federal" and "discretionary" are weasel qualifiers that attempt to make military spending look artificially large. For one thing, defense is one of the relatively few things the federal government is supposed to be doing--you would expect defense to account for a disproportionately large fraction of "federal" expenditures. (And it makes for misleading comparisons to countries with unified governments, where mil…

> defense is one of the relatively few things the federal government is supposed to be doing Most people agree the government should also be providing some type of insurance i.e. social safety net.(social security, medicare) Also where are you getting the 7.65 trillion number from? Most numbers I've seen were close to 4 trillion see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...

Federal government spending is about 4 trillion.

7.65 is Fed + State + Local.

Re: How China is replacing America as Asia’s military titan

#59

Post by jeffbax »

JimboOmega wrote: post #18
noobermin wrote: post #8

We should match our military spending with China's, that should do it. EDIT: I hope everyone realizes this is sarcastic. We already spend more than China and then some.

It kind of worked with the Soviet Union. They tried to keep up, but just didn't have the economic power to do it. It won't with China, because China isn't playing the force projecting world superpower game like the SU was.

I can't say for sure, but I have a hard time believing a lot of our spend is less efficient than other nations (just like our spend on most sectors of the economy that are heavily government-involved, like healthcare and education where we get less bang for the buck)
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