And this is after they massaged the numbers, to avoid getting fired?
Now we only get to hear if inflation is "Aladeen" or "Aladeen"
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US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
111–120 of 412 posts
Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
The defence budget is America's job program. Very little of the money that is defense spending ends up in defense shareholder pockets. The overwhemling vast majority goes to propping up America's (now) anemic industrial base. Remember that virtually all defense dollars are constrained to only be spent on American made things and services. And most of money sent to the big contractors goes to the gazillion sub-contrac…
I believe less than a quarter of the defense budget is for salaries and compensations.
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-d...
22%. But operations also includes civilian salaries and procurement naturally includes the labor required to produce what was procured. I would assume that R&D also includes research grants and salaries.
Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
#113Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this? Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think…
> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win.
Win what exactly?
Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
The defence budget is America's job program. Very little of the money that is defense spending ends up in defense shareholder pockets. The overwhemling vast majority goes to propping up America's (now) anemic industrial base. Remember that virtually all defense dollars are constrained to only be spent on American made things and services. And most of money sent to the big contractors goes to the gazillion sub-contrac…
I believe less than a quarter of the defense budget is for salaries and compensations.
Presumably that's only for DoD employees and people serving in the armed forces? It doesn't include defense contractor salaries.
Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
The defence budget is America's job program. Very little of the money that is defense spending ends up in defense shareholder pockets. The overwhemling vast majority goes to propping up America's (now) anemic industrial base. Remember that virtually all defense dollars are constrained to only be spent on American made things and services. And most of money sent to the big contractors goes to the gazillion sub-contrac…
I believe less than a quarter of the defense budget is for salaries and compensations.
That is only for people in the DoD.
Almost nothing that the DoD uses is made by the DoD. It's pretty much all 3rd party contractors, and those contractors handle paying their employees.
Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
#116Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this? Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think…
>Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.
Ask Ukraine how that worked out for them. While your at it, tell the Baltics they should focus on society and not the Russian world that is coming for them.
Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
#117[dead]
Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
#118Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this? Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think…
It's a very difficult belief to have in the long run, because if the source of the "error" is always in one direction, it will compound to price level differences impossible to hide. It's like the traditional view on GDP growth. Be a little slower than a similar country (say 0.5% a year) wait 20 years, and your formerly similar neighbor now sees your country as quite poor.
And yet many less-rich countries have better infrastructure and health outcomes than the US. It seems clear that chasing GDP without also considering what is happening to wealth distribution has socially hollowed the otherwise-rich US.
Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
#119Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this? Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think…
> I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Do you mean the other way around? The EU headline inflation rate doesn't include costs of owning a home like the US' does (owner's equivalent rent), which, as you might have guessed if you have ever wanted to own…
This is actually quite interesting. I ran into Stefan Ingves on the street in Stockholm, the former Governor of the Swedish Riksbank, and asked him why the Swedish inflation calculations did not include housing prices.
The short answer is that they're waiting on a harmonised EU wide system for that will include housing in some measure, but that has been taking longer than expected and they didn't want to change the system in Sweden before the new system was finished...
Quite frustrating given the massive increase in housing prices since '08. Would probably have been much lower with a higher interest rate.
Re: US Wholesale Inflation Rises by Most in 3 Years
#120Over the years I have read a few articles or blogs that make the argument that if government inflation figures in the US were calculated as they do in Europe, then our reported US inflation figures would be much higher. Can anyone here verify this? Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures. If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think…
> Our main problems involve under the table unreported to the public military expenditures.
This is a common claim but I don't think it's supported. Defense spending is about 3.3% of GDP [0]. 15 years ago it was 4.9%, 40 years ago it was 6.45%, and it hit almost 10% in 1967 during peak spending in the Vietnam war. World War 2 made it around 35%. Also, what does unreported mean? Are you claiming that there is a significant amount of money being spent that isn't part of the reported military budget? How much? Defense spending was about 13% of the government budget in 2024 [1].
> If you look at a map of our military bases, we have many bordering China. I think our total number is close to 900.
How much do those cost? I understand the claim is a lot, but how much? If you don't know, why pick this as an example?
> Those costs are a bleeding hemorage to the middle class tax payer who aren’t getting a cut of military profiteering because they don’t own ‘defense’ stocks.
Defense stocks have not performed better relative to the Dow Jones. Raytheon stock has increased 5-fold since 1985 while the Dow has increased 33-fold over the same period. If defense was easy money, you'd see hedge funds loading up on it year on year. These companies aren't valued that much. Raytheon is valued at 208B [2], which is less than McDonalds, Nestle, T-Mobile, AMD, Home Depot, and Costco individually.
> Eventually countries that don't spend most of their treasure on their military will win. There has to be a balance between true defense spending and healthy spending like feeding and educating children, infrastructure, R&D that helps society, etc.
I agree with this, but given that America only spends 13% of the budget on the department of defense, your own claim is claiming an American win. In 2021 the American Rescue Plan induced a giant amount of domestic welfare spending plans such as almost doubling the child tax credit. This was a tremendously expensive plan that cut child poverty in half, but people didn't feel strongly enough to successfully pressure politicians to keep it, which does seem pretty frustrating to me.
Also, I see you're using AI for sources below. Feed your comment into GPT 5 thinking and ask for an opinion, because it apparently thinks your inflation claim is completely reversed.
[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...