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Someone made a profit. Just not you!
The Chance for Peace speech, also known as the Cross of Iron speech, was an address given by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 16, 1953, shortly after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Speaking only three months into his presidency, Eisenhower likened arms spending to stealing from the people, and evoked William Jennings Bryan in describing "humanity hanging from a cross of iron." Although Eisenhower, a former military man, spoke against increased military spending, the Cold War deepened during his administration and political pressures for increased military spending mounted. By the time he left office in 1961, he felt it necessary to warn of the military-industrial complex in his final address.
I don't really believe this because a lot of Americans work for the defense industry. Just check Indeed in the DC area and you'll see what I mean. That doesn't even factor in people who work in the factories in Alabama or whatever. The military-industrial complex isn't all bad
The people never benefit, just the billionaires and corporate elite. Why not focus taxes on them instead of just all out plunder like a bunch of assholes?
The plunder will be used for the explicit purpose of paying for government programs like Social Security and Medicare. I'm talking about the federal government, not corporate America. Not to mention I literally said soldiers and sailors will get their cut and they're average people with families.
And what happens when every country stops doing business with us? You realize the deficit would far outpace any temporary gains from plunder when unemployment hits 40%
> And what happens when every country stops doing business with us?
They would be much more affected than we would be. American agriculturalists supply a great share of the world's food so rising commodity prices would not hurt us there. They use our technology and intellectual property. Cutting them off from these would destroy entire nations, especially when you talk about cloud and digital infrastructure.
We do half of our trade with Canada and Mexico anyway so we are not that exposed to global trade.
Any country that would refuse to pay tribute would understand they would be ruined. Even if we don't count the possibility of retaliatory strikes by the US military.
Also "not that exposed to global trade" If half our trade is with countries we don't border... what do you think happens to half our economy if they stop trading with us?
A massive chunk of that is NATO and Western Hemisphere countries which depend on us massively and will either be worked into some kind of plunder-sharing agreement or will roll over.
The rest similarly depend on our navy guarding their container ships (see: China) and will probably pay up for long enough that we can pay down our debts. It would take them like 30 years to match the USN's tonnage on the oceans.
Ahhh, good old American exceptionalism! This sounds so much like the nonsense we were fed during the Brexit campaign, idiots believed it and now the UK is in the toilet (literally, with all the raw sewage that's being pumped into our waterways). All I would say is be careful what you wish for! Britain are the OG of plundering the rest of the world. Don't kid yourself - not a penny ends up supporting the struggling of the home nation. The rich just get richer.
Destroying the global economy only furthers our own demise. Even if everyone else did collapse worse than us as you imply they would, we too would collapse. It would be the ends times. Globalization is how we've attained capital dominance and you're suggesting we do isolationism which is the very strategy that lines up with most of America's worst economic periods (and all nations for that matter.) The only reason I'm even continuing this conversation is out of the assumption you're being genuine and just need this sort of education.
1) The definition of a war crime is arbitrarily set by international treaties written by government functionaries. If our government refuses to recognize something as a war crime, then it is not. Something is only a war crime if you can be held accountable for it: the USA cannot be.
2) We are already committing war crimes and no one domestically really seems to care so this should not be some kind of outrage anyway.
Our government has already shown they don't care about ideas of international law or universal human rights when they give cluster munitions to Israel to use against civilians and oversee coups in other countries. The rest of the world has already realized this, it's about time we just become logically consistent in our role as a global hegemon and try to monetize this empire instead of subsidizing it.
Morality? Our government has, for the last 4 years, abandoned morality in so many ways. It is becoming non-existent in the U. S. and there aren't too many people that think it even matters!!!
Whatever you say!!! You are wrong. .. In the last 4 years people speak openly about not caring about morals, values, etc..... you're response simply proves that.
We should just hack apart the moon instead. There are at least $10,000 Trillion worth of rare moonstones. We can use literally the same rockets we currently have deployed in the Middle East to shoot ourselves to the moon and gather as many moon rocks as we can carry in a nice wheelbarrow to bring back. Best part is, with the latest state-of-the-art landing technology, we can reuse the rockets over and over again!
Just getting 1% of those rare moonstones will pay for 100 years of US military spending.
Yeah that's a great idea and I think we should expand into space. But the money just isn't there right now. That's why I think we should exact maybe a decade-or-so long campaign of privateering on the high seas to stabilize our budget deficit. Hopefully in a decade or so our economy will have grown to where we can fund such an ambitious program but right now we have only limited funding for Moon missions. Right now only 6 Artemis missions are planned and they are purely scientific and PR missions, to be honest. At our current rate of debt intake who knows if congress pulls the plug in a few more years like we did after Apollo. We have more than $2 trillion in debt every year...
Have you never heard of the saying “you gotta spend money to make money”?
We don’t need to have the funds on hand now. That’s what the treasury bond market is for!
Yeah but our debt-to-gdp ratio is upwards of 125% and we have no plan to deal with it. Now is not the time to be allocating money we don't have on programs with a 50 or 100 year time horizon to break even. We have to solve our debt problem before we collapse and lose global hegemony. Unlike spacefaring infrastructure, our military is already built so we should use it to raise money.
Who said anything about a 50-100 year payback? I think we can do it in 2-3 trips max. I’m talking BIG wheelbarrows. If the wheelbarrows are too big to fit inside the shuttle, just strap it to the back.
I don't have any solid numbers on this but my gut says we have to construct so much infrastructure, probably trillions of dollars worth, just to start mining the Moon. Not to mention life support for workers and all the other stuff. We need regular flights to resupply them. We can't fully automate the process yet so we need flesh and blood workers overseeing things. And then if we manage to do all of that, how do we get the goods back to Earth? Send it through the atmosphere where it'll burn up and probably land in the ocean or in some corn field? It doesn't make economic sense. We need some kind of space tether or orbital ring. Starship is probably at least 5 years away and scaling that up could take like 20 years. It just doesn't make sense right now.
I remember a statistic that said something along the lines of “the US spends more on its military than the next 17 [or so] highest-spending nations *combined.”* Very impressive. We’re definitely ahead of anyone else
So anyways, we do this and the next 18 (or so) most powerful militaries in the world band together and fight us. Then we’re stuck spending copious amounts of money on warfare instead of something like paying off our debt, we lose, anyhow, and we make no money off this venture
Other problem: Say no one wants to band together against us. Say we blow up Italy’s ports. Russia then goes “yeah, nah, and if you try seizing our cargo, it’s war time, baby.” Well hah! Who the fluff cares? Russia can’t win a war against *Ukraine-* a military far smaller than its military- let alone one as *massive* as-
Oops, Russia just launched all their nukes because they obviously couldn’t win the war. Now we lunch ours. Now both the US and Russia are essentially wiped off the map and our military vessels answer to no one but their highest officer onboard, who in turn don’t necessarily coordinate but instead likely jockey for power in the aftermath. Everybody lost! That’s the problem of mutually assured destruction; it doesn’t really matter what your military size is, it only matters how big your nuclear arsenal is, and even then past a point it’s not like you can blow people up any harder
Also: we spend 1 trillion dollars in military spending per year? Our debt is 17 trillion. Spend all our military money on debt and it’s gone in 17 years with *no other changes* needed. Oh, sorry, that would leave us defenseless? Ok, just reduce the debt by 2/3rds and put us on par with the second strongest nation for a while and then boom, we’ll be done in like 26 years or so
Last point: we spend 1 trillion a year on military. Using the above method would get rid of all our debt in 17-26 years. If your method was faster- is we extracted more than a trillion dollars out of the global economy- then it would be preferable to them not to give us the money, but to instead fund a military group bigger than ours. The only way that wouldn’t make sense to do is if we were extracting *less* than our military budget out of them, at which point we *should* use our military budget for debt relief, instead!
> Oops, Russia just launched all their nukes because they obviously couldn’t win the war.
You don't seriously believe the Russians are going to destroy the entire world over a 6% tax, do you? I am unconvinced.
>Spend all our military money on debt and it’s gone in 17 years with no other changes needed.
We need our military or else China and Russia will take over the world. We are barely able to hold this thing together as it is.
>then it would be preferable to them not to give us the money,
Then we just blow up enough countries until the others get the message and pay up. Then they won't have enough money to invest into military expansion and we buy American hegemony another 50 years.
"We spend almost $1 trillion per year on our military, more than 3 times what the next country (China) spends and we have by far the strongest navy in the world."
Do you not think declaring open war on the entire world might change other countries' budgetary priorities?
"The United States should send our navy out into the world charging protection money for ships transporting goods on the global oceans"
Where are we basing that navy now that you've declared war on the entire world? You're aware ships require bases?
"Considering the stablity and prosperity our control of the global oceans offers the tiny, irrelevant countries of the world like Germany or India"
Did you make a typo?
"I unironically believe that we should do this"
Then you should present it in a way as to be less likely to be mistaken for trolling.
> Do you not think declaring open war on the entire world might change other countries' budgetary priorities?
Not if they're paying 6% annually in direct transfers to us. and we can blow up their shipyards whenever we feel like it.
> Where are we basing that navy now that you've declared war on the entire world? You're aware ships require bases?
Maybe we can give them a "friends and family" discount and cut their tax to 3%.
>Did you make a typo?
Nope.
I gotta say, this is one of the funnier threads I've ever seen. I feel inspired to 'embrace' the flaws of our oligarchy like you have.
Speaking of budget balancing.. Maybe we can rent out our school shooters to Israel to recoup some $ lost funding their genocide. They'd be able to do what they love, kill children, and since Israel considers everyone in Gaza a terrorist, we can charge a flat rate of a couple hundred bucks per head and I'm sure they'd gladly pay it since their troops are too scared to actually get close to the citizens there for fear of Hamas.
Our school shooters are definitely more Brave than the IDF soldiers and may inspire them with their courage so that they don't have hang ups like staying alive while they murder civilians indiscriminately.
The money raised could go into a fund for US teachers to purchase tranquilizer guns to use on future school shooters. We don't want them to be killed since they're too valuable, since when they're done in Gaza, they can always come back and become agents for the American President, like when Nixon had the Cuban CIA assets attack Daniel Ellsburg (the Pentagon Papers whistleblower), with orders to 'fully incapacitate him.'
The surviving school shooters,(and future ones as well, there will probably never be a shortage), could really do a lot of bad around the world while bringing in good profits. They'd be enabled to make a difference for democracy.
Something to think about.
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Literally just tax the wealthy people. Increase the tax on top wealth and fund the IRS properly to get the taxes already owed and you'll see a massive increase in revenue, more than enough to make up the deficit.
Can you give me a single piece of advice that that is politically possible? Show me a path to 60 votes in the Senate. I don't think you can because all of those people are in the pocket of lobbyists.
I can show you a hundred ways to 51 votes for war though. Look at the AUMF against Iraq in 2003. That was a mentally regarded war and our representatives from both parties voted for it like clapping seals.
Yeah! I never understood why we can't tax rich people. There's a lot of celebrities and businesses worth millions and make millions and yet we can't just take a little bit of that? We can, America just doesn't want to upset the wealthy. If we just taxed the wealthy instead of the middle and poor class, we might actually accomplish something
> The United States is currently running a deficit of almost $2 trillion. That's a lot of money and we are probably unable to pay this off without raising taxes
This is a misunderstanding of what government debt is. It's not like a loan to make a purchase, it's more like an interest bearing investment: The people lending the US money are investing in US economic growth and expect a return on investment.
To "pay off" the debt would piss these investors off (they are expecting a certain predictable return on their investment) and would potentially do more damage to the US economy than your piracy idea as people wouldn't trust to invest in the US anymore.
We've been in a huge economic boom for like 15 years and have only been running bigger and bigger deficits. Our only ways out are to devalue the US Dollar which is a no-go or massive austerity which would send us into a permanent recession just like Europe.
>your piracy idea as people wouldn't trust to invest in the US anymore.
Where else are they going to keep their money? We are the only safe haven and the world's economic engine.
If the US started doing global piracy we wouldn't really be a safe haven anymore, would we? I'm guessing other countries would most likely start working together against us and while the US military is big I don't think it is big enough to take on the rest of the world.
It would take China more than a hundred years to match the US Navy in tonnage at their current rate of construction. We have a massive advantage right now, time to press it before we fall into the Thucydides Trap
>We've been in a huge economic boom for like 15 years and have only been running bigger and bigger deficits.
This makes sense- the bigger the economy, the bigger the deficit. we don't need to rein it in, that's not how it works.
The US military might be strong, but a global rebellion is beyond even their power. No ports, attacks on supply ships trying to supply far flung battle groups, no semi conductors for new munitions, a complete shut down of imports into the US, crews destroying their cargo to keep it out of US hands, decades long guerrilla warfare, soldiers who would refuse to follow illegal or unethical commands, possibility of civil war, the list is endless for the ways this idea goes sideways.
let's actually debate this. give me a list of countries that would join the rebellion and we can war game this.
we don't need to send boots on the ground, we can just bomb them from the air. attacking Countries with nukes would be off the table, maybe we can just take them out of the plan. but most of the world is just too small and poor to really stand up to us. Even the nuclear powers like India are not going to end the world over a trade war. We can just stop and search their ships far from their coast and bomb strategic rail choke points in third countries to paralyze them and force them to trade by sea, they would be very hard pressed to do anything
How are you going to stop attacks on your supply ships? What will you use for semi conductors to replace those lost or destroyed in battle? How will you prevent soldiers from disobeying orders? What about generals or battle groups who do not believe in your plan? The rest of the world doesn't really need to stand up to you. Just refuse to acknowledge your demands. Inflation would be insane for the US in a scenario like this. Critical supplies would be severely limited. Food, fuel, and manufactured goods would be in short supply. The US is a powerhouse, but it is not big enough to hold the world for ransom.
> What will you use for semi conductors to replace those lost or destroyed in battle?
We already have Taiwan and we're building out fabs here. Piracy profits will help accelerate reshoring of this stuff.
> How will you prevent soldiers from disobeying orders? What about generals or battle groups who do not believe in your plan?
We already have protocols for this. We've been committing war crimes for like 60 years and no one cared. Nothing will change now.
>Inflation would be insane for the US in a scenario like this. Food, fuel, and manufactured goods would be in short supply.
Not if we can flood our own market with free foreign goods at will.
>The US is a powerhouse, but it is not big enough to hold the world for ransom.
I think we are. You need to present me a list of non-US Allied countries that could actually stand up to us and dethrone us. China, India, and Russia combined couldn't do anything except launch nukes, which they're not gonna do. The rest of the world is a non-factor.
Your faith in the US military and lack of concern for the combined might of the world are both dreadfully wrong. The world has banded together to fight a common enemy, and this time would be no different. Countries around the world would work together to stop this, and it wouldn't take a direct confrontation to achieve it. Simple denial of assets would be enough to halt the US war machine. Look to any war fought against a guerrilla force and look at the outcome. You know every country would oppose this and offer resistance. Soviets, China, India, the EU, and more would oppose the US. It would be a war of attrition that the US would lose. They are no longer a manufacturing powerhouse and building the infrastructure needed to achieve that would take decades.
You can change my mind if you can give me a list of countries who are not already treaty allies that could realistically stop our navy on the high seas without nuclear weapons. That would actually change my mind.
Treaty allies would turn against the US. With no foreign bases, the reach of the navy would be very limited. I do not need to name a country that could stop the US as the entire world would oppose them. If that were to fail, the world would be broken up into large and small powers fighting the US and each other. Russia, China, Japan, and a host of other countries would band together and target one carrier group at a time and destroy it. Guerrilla warfare has a funny way of working. US in Vietnam, Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and a slew of other conflicts that forced a larger army into retreat are ample proof of its effectiveness.
I'm not talking a land invasion you're just talking about something else entirely.
What combination of [these countries](https://chuckhillscgblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/naval-balance.jpg) is capable of stopping us? Honestly, that would change my mind.
I am not talking about a land invasion but a campaign to control the oceans. The US might start out strong, but all those nations combined could stop the US navy juggernaut. Take over all US land based ports, deny access to any port in the world, and start harassing the US fleet. They would start to run low on supplies and fuel and be forced into a fighting retreat. Since the World fleet would still have ports and supply chains much closer than the US fleet they could run a campaign of harassing and whittling down the US fleet who could not stand and fight until they were within a few hundred miles of their coast, at which point they would either be spread extremely thin or bunched up on one coast or the other and would be unable to venture out beyond the supply chain they could establish. The World Fleet then attacks the supply chain and one battle group at a time. The US would be worn down slowly and eventually destroyed. There are more ship building yards outside the US than there are in the US. The world fleet could supply new ships faster than the US could. There are also more factories globally that could supply munitions and supplies faster.
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I agree with the very first paragraph so much
The rest not so much, no country will or can even kick the US out of the UN, especially not so simply. Any actual attempt would probably break apart the UN
And switching a world accepted currency like the US to any other one is imo impossible these days, and any attempt will take generations to really settle in
Def. Agree with a big change in trade and bsuiness/manufacturing relations though
And yea this post somehow is overestimating the power of the US by soo much
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This is like the airbud rule that there isn’t a rule that says dogs can’t play basketball. Friend, if we are at war with every other member of the UN then the rules don’t matter. Put a gun to your landlord’s head and you’re on the street whether or not your lease includes a ‘no attempted murder’ clause.
That's one UN building. They could easily move the whole shebang to their IMO offices in London, or a different office in Geneva, etc, etc.
Heck, I'd imagine any shitty airport hotel with a decent size conference room could put something together for them at short notice.
This is not the "gotcha" some folk think it is..
At some point, you are just setting up a second UN without America in it; a different set of diplomats, a different set of rules, a different set of places to meet, and all of that.
That's fine; they can do that. But the actual UN as an institution itself is fundamentally tied to America.
Via a building. People can always go and meet somewhere else, it doesn't have to be in New York.
To be fair, as parts of OP's plan go, this is by far the smallest point going. This whole thing reeks of too much CoD, Cheetos and Moutain Dew
And the permanent seat that says that the rules of UN as a club don't apply to the permanent members.
And the fact that via the building, everyone who regularly shows up there lives in New York! If the US is going rogue, guards can be posted at the airport to prevent anyone from leaving.
The OP's plan isn't going to work, obviously, but I don't see this UN doing much.
Are you serious? As if email isn’t a thing. “Hey America is probably going to hold us hostage or kill us if we don’t bend over for them, maybe let’s go somewhere else?”
> Countries can't just waltz into someone else's territory like it's a buffet line at a cheap diner. It's called international law, and it frowns upon piracy, which is pretty much what you're suggesting here. If your reply is, ‘yeah so what? What are they going to do?’ They kick us out of the UN, abandon the US dollar as the backing of their currency systems and switch to the BRICS system, and cut off trade with the US.
Yeah. Okay. So what.
First of all, we have a permanent seat on the security council so the UN can't do anything. Half of our trade is with Mexico and Canada who are our lapdogs. The poor nations of the world (Europe and Asia especially) are completely dependent on North America for everything. All the biggest tech companies in the world, global finance, military industrial complex, blah blah blah, is all here. They need access to our market, our capital, and our navy to guarantee their shipping. We can monetize that and the fact that we haven't done so already shows our leaders are stupid or corrupt.
>We no longer can import top soil to support our agriculture, we lose access to the semiconductors that our military and infrastructure is built off of, we lose access to the lithium mines our batteries are built off of.
We can just literally threaten them and all but about 5 countries on earth would roll over because they can't hope to stand up to us. Be realistic.
>Look at the supplychain flow of our biggest companies: Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA - they’re all dependent on overseas labor and supplies.
We can negotiate for that on a master-tributary basis. If Taiwan doesn't want to pay us for the privilege of building our semiconductors we can just threaten to bomb them and use the money we take from other countries to build more fabs here. Not that complicated.
>10% of our GDP vanishes overnight, minimum.
How?
> Not to mention a swath of US citizens overseas are taken as prisoners as a gamble to combat US aggression - look at Russia doing this to US citizens now.
Not a big deal in the global scheme of things.
>Riots and unrest will break out domestically, political gridlock will intensify, and culturally the US will be in chaos as it tries to make sense of this failed new world order we tried to impose. And this is assuming that our global blackmail doesn’t kick off a domino effect that leads to a nuclear exchange.
This is all speculation. Not to mention that political gridlock is how we got to have $35 trillion in debt and no way to pay it back. But we do have the largest military in the world and about 50 years to bully other countries into paying us back for it before someone can stand up to us. Time to collect on our investments and try to cement our hegemony for another century.
>Furthermore, even if the previously mentioned factors weren’t in play - the US doesn’t have the naval power to essentially bully the entire planet into submission. Since the end of the Cold War, we’ve scaled back our number of destroyers considerably in exchange for fewer but larger ships and aircraft carriers, meaning there are too many blind spots for us to realistically cover everything effectively. Don’t believe me? Look at the piracy in the Mediterranean we’ve tried and failed to prevent.
This is a good point. This is why I brought up the threat of force against countries who don't play ball. We have a hard time protecting commerce at scale but we do have the capability to basically choose any country on earth and just destroy it with our aircraft carrier groups. If a small irrelevant country like Tunisia or Bangladesh doesn't want to play ball, we can just send them back to the stone age by bombing all their port infrastructure, strategic bridges, waste management, water treatment, etc. (which were probably paid for with American capital). Other countries will realize that we are running a protection racket and will play ball. This is how a mafia works and unless you have a global policeman, the mafia wins out in the end. We are playing the role of policeman, we should be playing the mafioso.
This is a novella of unrealistic bs that sounds like it’s informed by call of duty fan fiction and military YouTube channels. UN rules go out the window if we literally threaten every member there. Try holding a gun to your landlord’s head and then say, ‘you can’t kick me out because we signed a lease.’ UN won’t mean shit - more than likely it’ll be redesigned with the rest of the world in a reverse uno card nato system to keep folks safe from the US.
You say to be realistic when it comes to the viability of us blackmailing less powerful countries for necessary resources. Obviously you’re unfamiliar with salted earth tactics. If we go in guns blazing to try and extort these resources, more than likely the countries will destroy the infrastructure on their retreat to make sure we can’t have them. Same thing happened to Germany when they tried invading Russia, and it’s the same reason why China attempting what you’ve suggested with Taiwan hasn’t made any progress - because they don’t have the means to build such advanced chip manufacturing sites and neither do we, and everyone knows that if Taiwan really had their ass to the fire they could neuter the entire industry and send technology back a decade.
You ask how 10% of our GDP vanishes. That much of our economy is conservatively based on imports. Most put it closer to 15%.
You say it’s only speculation that there would be social unrest in the US if we began privateering the entire globe. You must be high - we’re losing our minds over Israel and Gaza right now and that’s something we’re not even directly involved in. Just wait until US troops start dying to rob other countries many our citizens likely still have family in. Just wait until terror attacks start unfolding in record number domestically. And prisoners of war are not a small thing - maybe read some history, specifically the Iran Hostage crises.
We have the strongest military, but it’s nowhere near large enough to police the entirety of a hostile world. Likely this little experiment would fall apart within a week.
And more to the point, if someone were to try to kick out anyone from the UN, the order would have to be physically carried out by the NYPD.
The UN is not designed to defend against America as the rogue state.
You talk as if security council rules don’t go out the window when we’re essentially at war with every other member. This wouldn’t be like Russia getting sanctioned or shadow-blocked from UN proceedings, this would be us walking into a room where we’re blatantly attempting to extort every single person in attendance.
>this would be us walking into a room where we’re blatantly attempting to extort every single person in attendance.
While American police officers are there to uh, provide physical security. The room is physically in New York!
So what? Is there some natural law Im unaware of that forces UN members to physically show up even when they know they’re probably going to be taken hostage? Your logic is equivalent to saying, “shit the office is on fire but my cubicle is in there - guess I have to burn to death.”
Some do - but these aren’t the heads of state or actual decision makers. If a rep held hostage in New York says, “yeah we’ll pay” that doesn’t mean the nation is actually going to pay. What happens is one ugly session where these reps are taken hostage, their home countries denounce and cut ties with the US before and then rehouse the new US-free UN somewhere else. Nobody is showing up in New York after that.
I am talking about the decision making within the UN itself. America votes in the UN, but it isn’t Joe Biden who cast the vote: it is the American representative to the UN. If that person doesn’t listen to Biden, Biden can appoint a new one, but point is, someone posted at the UN makes the votes.
This obviously won’t affect their home countries, but again, this is why the UN as an institution can’t used against the US going rogue. They have to set up a new one with new everything.
Then we’re arguing semantics - whether it is called the UN or rebranded as something else, located in New York or Berlin or London, it doesn’t matter. The point is that the US is no longer a part of the international decision making body which would be one of many reasons why OP’s plan would fail.
I wouldn’t bet on a new UN forming, to be honest. The UN, and the League of Nations before it, were both American ideas that only happened because America pushed for it.
I can’t see someone else playing a similar role while in an active crisis. There would be so much bickering about the rules of the new UN that it would be hard to form.
That said, OP’s plan still wouldn’t work.
Yeah, and we would still be able to walk into that room and veto everything. If they want to throw out the rules and proceed anyway, they no longer have the legitimacy the UN offers, and are just falling back on their own militaries for backing anyway.
Money isn't really worth anything without goods and services attached to it.
You'd have to somehow seize those without disrupting global trade. Which is basically impossible. You would trash the world economy costing us 10 times more than you could possibly extract doing this.
1) Half of our trade is with Mexico and Canada so we are not that exposed.
2) The rest of the world understands the principles you lay out here as well, which is why they would just roll over and pay the tax.
Pay with what? Money is useless in this scenario. It has to be backed by goods and services.
You have to either seize means of production or seize natural resources. Both of which are major headaches and produce more trouble than they are worth.
It's cheaper to just import a bunch of high IQ people from India and China and let them build means of production for us. Which is exactly what we're doing.
State piracy has not existed to the extent you are suggesting nor has it happened in a time where a much smaller army had an effective means to fight back against a much larger army (i.e. a nuke).
Did you suggest like blowing up Italy? If I was a European country who saw a neighbor get blown up by the worlds largest pirate fleet, I'd consider nuking the pirate fleet.
A nuke is a big escalation compared to finding some way to dodge our tax considering Mutually Assured Destruction.
>Did you suggest like blowing up Italy? If I was a European country who saw a neighbor get blown up by the worlds largest pirate fleet, I'd consider nuking the pirate fleet.
If France or Britain complain we can just bribe them, right?
>A nuke is a big escalation compared to finding some way to dodge our tax considering Mutually Assured Destruction.
Dodge our tax? You can't dodge an aircraft carrier blowing up your ports.
>If France or Britain complain we can just bribe them, right?
So we go out and pirate the world for the purposes of balancing our budget. Then we spend all the extra money bribing every country with a nuke putting our budget in the negative again? How much money do you think it will cost to bribe all those countries? And I assume we wouldn't pirate the people we are bribing right (or else why would they accept the bribe)? So that is more lost revenue from this scheme.
And what about those countries that have take a principled stance against the US and reject the bribe anyway (like Russia or China or North Korea)?
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Seems like a lot of effort and needlessly putting lives at risk. If you're concerned about a $2 trillion deficit, why not just print up a shiny new $2 trillion dollar bill and balance the budget that way. Literally a 2 minute solution to this alleged problem.
$2 trillion debt vs. additional $2 trillion in cash and no debt has the exact same impact on the economy. They are literally, economically, the same thing.
You don't understand macro economics. The U.S. issuing $2 trillion in debt adds $2 trillion to the economy. The U.S. printing (and circulating) 2 trillion $1 bills adds $2 trillion to the economy. There is literally zero economic difference.
Absolutely. The United States already secures the global oceans for international shipping. It's about time we got our due for doing this free labor for the nations of the world who don't spend $800 billion annually on defense to protect their own shipping. And a small 6% tax on global commerce will encourage Americans to continue guaranteeing the safety of international trade for years to come instead of retreating into isolationism.
Plus, If the United States debt problem is solved, we will see a rapid rise in the American economy and Americans will have more money to invest abroad in our partner countries.
No, the status quo is global ocean trade and the USA already benefits from this.
You're proposing bricking that with world war 3.
That will lose us allies, slow trade, and choke the supply of your nation that depends on global fast trade. That means trillions in losses.
You'd rather have world war than raise taxes and invest in America lol
>No, the status quo is global ocean trade and the USA already benefits from this.
The status quo is the USA subsidizing global trade by spending 3% of our GDP on defense.
> You're proposing bricking that with world war 3.
No nation can compete with the US navy on the high seas and the thread of us stealing all their stuff would be enough to bully them into paying us, at least for long enough for us to balance our budget.
>That will lose us allies, slow trade, and choke the supply of your nation that depends on global fast trade.
We don't really need allies. We spend more on defense than the next 11 countries combined. We'll be fine.
And we don't really trade that much as a nation. Half of our trade is done with Canada and Mexico, so we can include them in on the privateering if they like and form a continental bloc that no one could ever hope to compete with.
> You'd rather have world war than raise taxes and invest in America lol
**I think this is where my proposal is actually more realistic than yours.** There is no way the current congress will be able to raise taxes. An entire political party and most of the other party are in the pocket of big business. A big reason why Fitch downgraded the US credit rating from AAA to AA+ is that general political gridlock and that we have no serious plan to combat the debt. You cannot get 60% of the Senate to break a filibuster to raise taxes.
However, recent history has shown that the Congress will vote for war, even unnecessary war. The Iraq War passed the Senate with 77 votes. That's a thundering majority for the war party. And my plan would enrich defense contractors, who have strong lobbying arms in DC. **Unironically, there is a higher chance of my plan being passed than just raising taxes on the rich a few percent.**
Luckily for the world, none of that is true. The US isn't subsidizing defense, it's just wasting too much money for the benefit of greedy lobbyists.
Our allies pay for defense too. The rest of nato even without the usa still spends more than Russia and China combined. They also help the usa even when we start stupid wars based on lies. The usa just wastes that much more.
>There is no way the current congress will be able to raise taxes
There is a strange fallacy here and I wish there was a name for it.
Your imagined solution requires so much never- before- seen political power so that you can get away with unilateral global war and multinational invasion of treatied allies.
But you think you don't have the political power to raise taxes as the current party in government literally already did.
> Luckily for the world, none of that is true. The US isn't subsidizing defense, it's just wasting too much money for the benefit of greedy lobbyists.
We are fighting Somali pirates and the Houthis. All of this goes to protect international commerce, which we are not all that engaged in as half of our trade is with Mexico and Canada.
As I said, treaties. Fighting Somali pirates and houthis, which is a new, recent, and small budget thing, is vastly less than starting world war 3 over ocean trade.
Please reply to what I said. Your world war 3 plan requires an absurd level of political control... which you could use to just directly fix the problem with taxes on the rich and investing in American prosperity.
> As I said, treaties.
We can just pull out of them or ignore them. We already ignore plenty of human rights treaties and conventions to arm countries like Ukraine or Israel. Israel kills a schoolbus of children like every day but we keep sending the bombs (for free). We can just apply the same disregard for international law to our own interests instead of Israel and Ukraine.
> Please reply to what I said. Your world war 3 plan requires an absurd level of political control... which you could use to just directly fix the problem with taxes on the rich and investing in American prosperity.
Can you clarify your question? I think I have addressed this before but if you expand a little more I can too.
I don't know how to make my point more obvious.
With the power and total national control necessary to force your nation into sustaining world war 3, destroy international trade, breach treaties, and invade good allies, just invest in America instead.
Why do you keep saying World War 3? I'm talking about a 6% tax on global shipping, no one is going to start World War 3 over that.
>just invest in America instead.
We have no money to invest and we are going bankrupt.
>which we are not all that engaged in as half of our trade is with Mexico and Canada.
1. That means 50% is NOT with Mexico and China and therefore significantly impacted by our influence internationally.
2. The US benefits tremendously from being the global reserve and trading currency. That disappears without US involvement abroad.
While ur post is deleted I just wanted to point out a simple flaw in your idea
You are assuming the nations are fighting alone against the US, thus the US is much stronger military wise than most sure
But not only will the US lose allies, those allies will no doubt work together against the US. The USA draws its power from the willingness of other countries, abuse it too much and there will be an obvious revolt. I can see enemy countries join together to take down the US and it won‘t be that difficult. Thats how past empires fell and that will not stop by the US either
There is no way in hell you wrote that while being serious right?
>We spend more on defense than the next 11 countries combined.
That's because your invoices are a bloated mess of a million hands taking a fist full. Outspending is not the same as out performing. China's navy alone out numbers the USA. They form an alliance with Australia and the US looses 4 vital military bases in Aus. China is Australia's top trade partner. Throw in other chinese trade partners New Zealand, Japan and Indonesia as allies and the US wont make a dent in the pacific.
How's vooting working out so far? Trump will probably be back in office in January and if he's not, it'll be Netanyahu's #1 simp (Biden). Americans don't vote for left-wingers.
Then you’re straight up ignorant. The only reason we are not doing so at the moment is because people like yourself don’t vote for democrats. The democrats are moderate right now because that’s the only option that gets enough votes. If we get 3-4 presidential election wins in a row, including the house and congress in midterm elections, then we can elect further and further left wing people, and have them still get support.
Think of it this way, our options are this: would you like to move the country to the left, or would you like to move the country to the right? If we choose to move to the left multiple times in a row, we will find ourselves pretty far over to the left. If we take a step to the left, then a step to the right, then a step to the left, then a step to the right, we are stuck in the middle.
I live in a safe blue state and haven't voted for a major party candidate in any of the last 3 elections. My vote is inconsequential.
You have to understand that a simple majority of the congress and the presidency is not enough to raise taxes on the rich. You need a 60% majority to break a filibuster and you forget that a large section of the Democratic party senators and congresspeople are in the pocket of big business. They will stand against efforts to raise taxes on the rich.
However, in recent history, Congress has shown that it will vote for any act of war that comes before it if you beat the war drum hard enough. So actually, privateering is a more realistic option than waiting for some non-existent socialist left to take over in the US.
The US is not the number 1 country in the world. #1 is Switzerland #2 is Canada and #3 is Sweden. The US is #5 after Australia.
As a Canadian we make fun of delusional Americans like you.
Hexagon, Spotify, Klarman, Sinch, Trustly, Cellink.
America will never be a #1 country again. The only people saying America is #1 is Americans. Everyone outside of America laughs at that shit.
We just need to raise taxes on our rich to a fraction of what they were in 1980. We have huge deficits because of repeated huge Republican tax cuts on the wealthy that were premised on the idea that they would pay for themselves.
That was a peak year -- I just did the math, and 2023 and 1984 are both just over 16% of the economy. (2022 was over 19%.). Perhaps accounting things that delayed payments during the pandemic caused the jump -- 21% jump in revenues 2021-2022. Revenues in 1979, before the Reagan tax cuts, were over 17.5% by my calculation.
Also, as far as I can tell, these tax numbers include social security tax, which has increased over time as that program has needed more revenue, and also includes medicare, whose taxes have also increased for the same reason, which explains why total revenues are the same percentage as 1984 after the Bush and Trump tax cuts.
That’s how you get world war 3. And that will blow up the deficit. So while your solution might have worked for ancient empires, it will not work today.
Also American would stop any leader who attempts to do just that.
So you’re okay killing innocent people just to take their money. There is an ethical dilemma inherit in your plan.
You will not get the public onboard.
I never said to kill people and I think it should be done as peacefully as possible. If we are to strike a port facility or a factory, we should call ahead to evacuate the facility before we begin our strike. In any case, I don't think it would be necessary since 99% of countries would just pay up.
We have people dying in this country too because of suicide because of underfunded services and drug overdoses and we need revenue to solve these problems. The gridlocked Congress is not going to meaningfully raise taxes or cut spending but have shown that they will vote for war whenever asked.
> So you’re okay killing people to save American lives?
Yeah so is everyone else in the country. What do you think the war on terror was about? We've already had this debate and one side won it decisively.
I never claimed it would be unlawful. I support expanding the Authorization for Use of Military force to allow the Commander-in-Chief to order the armed forces to use any means necessary to regulate international trade pursuant to the terms I've lain out above. I imagine our soldiers and sailors will be eager to collect their share of the booty.
Blowing up ports and fleets to make an example out of a country is illegal. Disrupting international trade is illegal. Unlawfully confiscated goods shipped internationally is illegal.
Basically every part of your plan is illegal. You might even be illegal at the rate you’re going.
Tell me, who’s going to buy all these illegally confiscated goods if every country in the world is now our enemy? You can’t make money off goods just sitting on container ships in the Port of Los Angeles.
> Blowing up ports and fleets to make an example out of a country is illegal. Disrupting international trade is illegal. Unlawfully confiscated goods shipped internationally is illegal.
Who says that? International treaties? Just pull out of them or stop enforcing them. It's not like the US respects international law when we invade Iraq for no reason or give Israel cluster bombs to kill children with. If we're going to ignore international law and be a corrupt hegemon, we should at least do it in a financially savvy way.
> Tell me, who’s going to buy all these illegally confiscated goods if every country in the world is now our enemy? You can’t make money off goods just sitting on container ships in the Port of Los Angeles.
They can buy them back on the global market. The United States spends more money on it's military than the next 11 nations combined. If we count all of NATO, that's $1 trillion per year on defense. If we give our allies a discount on their share of the tribute to be paid, there's no way any country in the world could stand up to us. We could end China by just blockading oil shipments to China through the Strait of Malacca and their navy doesn't have the range to attack us there. They'd be wise to just pay up.
The rest of the world allies against us, refuses to buy anything American, or any of our stolen goods, and you hasten the collapse of American society in such an utterly complete and rapid way that it breaks the sound barrier.
The US navy can’t simultaneously blockade, privateer, and defeat the entire world.
Can you explain how we would collapse? No country in the western hemisphere has a military that could hope to compete with ours so that entire hemisphere is safe. We control the Pacific ocean and have bases all around the world. Most countries in the world are pitifully small and I think we could bully some bigger countries like Russia, China, or India into paying up by choking off their access to strategic choke points like the gulf of Hormuz, Malacca Strait, or Red Sea. The costs of raising a fleet big enough to fight us would be much more than a small 6% duty on their international trade.
We are able to control the pacific because of our allies and bases. We are able to control the North Atlantic because of our NATO allies and base. We are able to control the gulf because of our allies and bases.
If no one can trust us, and now we aren’t running joint military ops with South Korea, Australia, gulf countries, et al, and we don’t have international bases anymore, and half our military has either deserted, or is imprisoned for refusing unlawful orders, then it’s physically impossible to spread ourselves so thin. You’ve basically eliminated like 3/4 of our capacity.
We’re not able to literally be everywhere at once without our allies.
> We are able to control the pacific because of our allies and bases. We are able to control the North Atlantic because of our NATO allies and base. We are able to control the gulf because of our allies and bases.
Okay, I agree with you. Maybe we can give those countries that have strategic bases like Japan, Korea, or Qatar a 50% discount on yearly tribute. They depend on us for their security even more than we depend on them for bases and will pay up. These are rich countries.
>If no one can trust us
Already no one trusts us, look at global opinion polling.
>half our military has either deserted, or is imprisoned for refusing unlawful orders
I don't see any reason why soldiers would desert when they can just take their cut of the booty. 10% of $100 Trillion is life-changing money for our service members.
>Okay, I agree with you. Maybe we can give those countries that have strategic bases like Japan, Korea, or Qatar a 50% discount on yearly tribute.
Were spread too thin, and since we’ve already attacked these countries and their allies, each one of them tells us to fuck off and come fight them for it. Which we can’t do since we don’t have any bases, allies, and have severely depleted and diluted our manpower trying to simultaneously fight everyone, steal everything, blockade every port, and police hundreds of different shipping routes.
>They depend on us for their security even more than we depend on them for bases and will pay up. These are rich countries.
They aren’t going to keep depending on us when we are at war with the entire world. That’s absurd.
>Already no one trusts us, look at global opinion polling.
Wrong.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/overall-opinion-of-the-u-s/
>I don't see any reason why soldiers would desert when they can just take their cut of the booty.
Lying to the country and telling them Iraq was responsible for 9/11, and bombing the shit out of Italy, where many service men and women have friends and families are two completely different things.
>10% of $100 Trillion is life-changing money for our service members.
No one is buying any of the goods we stole. Perishables rot in the port. Electronics sit untouched in shipping containers. 100% of zero dollars is exactly zero dollars.
You're strawmanning my argument.
1) We can reduce the tribute we demand from our NATO allies in exchange for keeping our bases there. We already de facto subsidize them when you consider how few of them have been meeting their defense obligations. So we would absolutely still retain our ability to touch any square inch of the Earth's surface.
2) I am not talking about a land war anywhere. I'm talking about forcing countries who trade by sea to pay us a duty for the privilege. If they refuse, we can cripple them quite easily by attacking strategic infrastructure like ports, dams, power plants, water treatment plants, and so forth. We don't need tons of munitions for this and few countries really have the long range missiles needed to retaliate with great effect. Those countries that do have that capability, we could just not demand tribute from them. If a third party wants to transfer military hardware to them, we can attack them en route or enact further sanctions like banning tech companies from doing business with them. All of this punishment would incure a greater cost than the 6% we are asking for. If you can give me a list of countries who could realistically resist this, we can talk more about specifics.
>Already no one trusts us, look at global opinion polling.
>Wrong.
1) This is just a favorability poll. It has little to do with how they view our role as a global hegemon. And when Trump or Bush Jr. were in office all of these numbers were underwater anyway so this makes me think it's largely based on biased media reporting influencing public opinion. We are a bipolar country and most people around the world understand that.
2) Most of the countries on that list are outright American allies. Not representative of the wider world. If you showed me a poll from Turkey, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia or other countries, you would probably get differing results.
3) If the world really trusted us, Iran would have renewed the Iran deal with us but we destroyed our legitimacy there by ripping it up. See: we are a bipolar country.
>Lying to the country and telling them Iraq was responsible for 9/11, and bombing the shit out of Italy, where many service men and women have friends and families are two completely different things.
And still nobody deserted. In fact, many of our soldiers were all too happy to commit war crimes and atrocities without being ordered, which shows that they don't care.
>No one is buying any of the goods we stole. Perishables rot in the port. Electronics sit untouched in shipping containers. 100% of zero dollars is exactly zero dollars.
Literally not our problem. It will drive up global commodity prices and we can use those goods to stabilize prices here at home while everyone else suffers. If they want to buy foodstuffs, they can buy it from American farmers who will sell at inflated prices into the market they created. This would extend the sunset of the monopolar American world order by decades at least.
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Our debt wouldn't grow because we'd take money from other countries to pay it down. If other countries collapse, that isn't our problem. Only about half our trade comes from non-NAFTA countries. Not our business. Time for them to pay up.
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The US already did that lmao. What a selfish, american world view. You sir are an evil person, change your views in life, the world doesn't revolve around you nor the US
This sounds like *checks notes* "Imperialism and Colonialism". Gee, you'd think if this was such a good idea countries would have tried this before.....
? Neither is gold bullion if you are tryna argue that our way of money isn‘t real but the trading of gold is
I mean sure gold itself is real
Just like dollar bills are
But the value we give them is of our own making, it might as well not exist
This will unlikely solve the deficit, since everyone will fight back as hard as they can, costing more than we're getting.
HOWEVER, it might hasten the one world government by sacrificing The USA for the greater good.
This may come as a shock, but the USA isn't the only country with a military..
Just because ours is larger, stronger, and better funded doesn't mean it's invincible.
We could easily win wars if we were actually willing to win them. Unfortunately they're handicapped politically by people who don't like actually doing what it takes to win
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Why don't we just invade an oil rich country and bleed them dry... oh wait nvm.
Hey, if we were going to conduct an illegal invasion of Iraq, we should have at least made a profit on it.
Someone made a profit. Just not you! The Chance for Peace speech, also known as the Cross of Iron speech, was an address given by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 16, 1953, shortly after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Speaking only three months into his presidency, Eisenhower likened arms spending to stealing from the people, and evoked William Jennings Bryan in describing "humanity hanging from a cross of iron." Although Eisenhower, a former military man, spoke against increased military spending, the Cold War deepened during his administration and political pressures for increased military spending mounted. By the time he left office in 1961, he felt it necessary to warn of the military-industrial complex in his final address.
I don't really believe this because a lot of Americans work for the defense industry. Just check Indeed in the DC area and you'll see what I mean. That doesn't even factor in people who work in the factories in Alabama or whatever. The military-industrial complex isn't all bad
You don't believe what? They were offering a quote that a real man said...
“I don’t really believe this because it won’t fit the narrative that’s been in my head” is crazy when you have solid quotes to back info up …
The people never benefit, just the billionaires and corporate elite. Why not focus taxes on them instead of just all out plunder like a bunch of assholes?
The plunder will be used for the explicit purpose of paying for government programs like Social Security and Medicare. I'm talking about the federal government, not corporate America. Not to mention I literally said soldiers and sailors will get their cut and they're average people with families.
And what happens when every country stops doing business with us? You realize the deficit would far outpace any temporary gains from plunder when unemployment hits 40%
What unemployment? Our citizens will be employed on the US battleships!
I thought you were OP for a second and was about to roast the shit out of you hahahaha
Then we take it from them. That was right there in the post. We just take things.
> And what happens when every country stops doing business with us? They would be much more affected than we would be. American agriculturalists supply a great share of the world's food so rising commodity prices would not hurt us there. They use our technology and intellectual property. Cutting them off from these would destroy entire nations, especially when you talk about cloud and digital infrastructure. We do half of our trade with Canada and Mexico anyway so we are not that exposed to global trade. Any country that would refuse to pay tribute would understand they would be ruined. Even if we don't count the possibility of retaliatory strikes by the US military.
Also "not that exposed to global trade" If half our trade is with countries we don't border... what do you think happens to half our economy if they stop trading with us?
A massive chunk of that is NATO and Western Hemisphere countries which depend on us massively and will either be worked into some kind of plunder-sharing agreement or will roll over. The rest similarly depend on our navy guarding their container ships (see: China) and will probably pay up for long enough that we can pay down our debts. It would take them like 30 years to match the USN's tonnage on the oceans.
Ahhh, good old American exceptionalism! This sounds so much like the nonsense we were fed during the Brexit campaign, idiots believed it and now the UK is in the toilet (literally, with all the raw sewage that's being pumped into our waterways). All I would say is be careful what you wish for! Britain are the OG of plundering the rest of the world. Don't kid yourself - not a penny ends up supporting the struggling of the home nation. The rich just get richer.
Destroying the global economy only furthers our own demise. Even if everyone else did collapse worse than us as you imply they would, we too would collapse. It would be the ends times. Globalization is how we've attained capital dominance and you're suggesting we do isolationism which is the very strategy that lines up with most of America's worst economic periods (and all nations for that matter.) The only reason I'm even continuing this conversation is out of the assumption you're being genuine and just need this sort of education.
The US govermment spent 5 trillion on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The profits went to Lockheed Martin, Blackwater and Halliburton.
It's literally a war crime, but go off
1) The definition of a war crime is arbitrarily set by international treaties written by government functionaries. If our government refuses to recognize something as a war crime, then it is not. Something is only a war crime if you can be held accountable for it: the USA cannot be. 2) We are already committing war crimes and no one domestically really seems to care so this should not be some kind of outrage anyway.
You dont care. Lol that doesnt mean others dont.
Our government has already shown they don't care about ideas of international law or universal human rights when they give cluster munitions to Israel to use against civilians and oversee coups in other countries. The rest of the world has already realized this, it's about time we just become logically consistent in our role as a global hegemon and try to monetize this empire instead of subsidizing it.
I mean, if your argument is why dont we all abandon any morality im not sure how anyone can change your mind. Lol
Morality? Our government has, for the last 4 years, abandoned morality in so many ways. It is becoming non-existent in the U. S. and there aren't too many people that think it even matters!!!
The last 4 years? Lol pretty sure “fuck your feelings” was being said by one side before that. Either way, its not an excuse to be even more immoral.
Whatever you say!!! You are wrong. .. In the last 4 years people speak openly about not caring about morals, values, etc..... you're response simply proves that.
We should just hack apart the moon instead. There are at least $10,000 Trillion worth of rare moonstones. We can use literally the same rockets we currently have deployed in the Middle East to shoot ourselves to the moon and gather as many moon rocks as we can carry in a nice wheelbarrow to bring back. Best part is, with the latest state-of-the-art landing technology, we can reuse the rockets over and over again! Just getting 1% of those rare moonstones will pay for 100 years of US military spending.
Yeah that's a great idea and I think we should expand into space. But the money just isn't there right now. That's why I think we should exact maybe a decade-or-so long campaign of privateering on the high seas to stabilize our budget deficit. Hopefully in a decade or so our economy will have grown to where we can fund such an ambitious program but right now we have only limited funding for Moon missions. Right now only 6 Artemis missions are planned and they are purely scientific and PR missions, to be honest. At our current rate of debt intake who knows if congress pulls the plug in a few more years like we did after Apollo. We have more than $2 trillion in debt every year...
Have you never heard of the saying “you gotta spend money to make money”? We don’t need to have the funds on hand now. That’s what the treasury bond market is for!
Yeah but our debt-to-gdp ratio is upwards of 125% and we have no plan to deal with it. Now is not the time to be allocating money we don't have on programs with a 50 or 100 year time horizon to break even. We have to solve our debt problem before we collapse and lose global hegemony. Unlike spacefaring infrastructure, our military is already built so we should use it to raise money.
Who said anything about a 50-100 year payback? I think we can do it in 2-3 trips max. I’m talking BIG wheelbarrows. If the wheelbarrows are too big to fit inside the shuttle, just strap it to the back.
I don't have any solid numbers on this but my gut says we have to construct so much infrastructure, probably trillions of dollars worth, just to start mining the Moon. Not to mention life support for workers and all the other stuff. We need regular flights to resupply them. We can't fully automate the process yet so we need flesh and blood workers overseeing things. And then if we manage to do all of that, how do we get the goods back to Earth? Send it through the atmosphere where it'll burn up and probably land in the ocean or in some corn field? It doesn't make economic sense. We need some kind of space tether or orbital ring. Starship is probably at least 5 years away and scaling that up could take like 20 years. It just doesn't make sense right now.
I remember a statistic that said something along the lines of “the US spends more on its military than the next 17 [or so] highest-spending nations *combined.”* Very impressive. We’re definitely ahead of anyone else So anyways, we do this and the next 18 (or so) most powerful militaries in the world band together and fight us. Then we’re stuck spending copious amounts of money on warfare instead of something like paying off our debt, we lose, anyhow, and we make no money off this venture Other problem: Say no one wants to band together against us. Say we blow up Italy’s ports. Russia then goes “yeah, nah, and if you try seizing our cargo, it’s war time, baby.” Well hah! Who the fluff cares? Russia can’t win a war against *Ukraine-* a military far smaller than its military- let alone one as *massive* as- Oops, Russia just launched all their nukes because they obviously couldn’t win the war. Now we lunch ours. Now both the US and Russia are essentially wiped off the map and our military vessels answer to no one but their highest officer onboard, who in turn don’t necessarily coordinate but instead likely jockey for power in the aftermath. Everybody lost! That’s the problem of mutually assured destruction; it doesn’t really matter what your military size is, it only matters how big your nuclear arsenal is, and even then past a point it’s not like you can blow people up any harder Also: we spend 1 trillion dollars in military spending per year? Our debt is 17 trillion. Spend all our military money on debt and it’s gone in 17 years with *no other changes* needed. Oh, sorry, that would leave us defenseless? Ok, just reduce the debt by 2/3rds and put us on par with the second strongest nation for a while and then boom, we’ll be done in like 26 years or so Last point: we spend 1 trillion a year on military. Using the above method would get rid of all our debt in 17-26 years. If your method was faster- is we extracted more than a trillion dollars out of the global economy- then it would be preferable to them not to give us the money, but to instead fund a military group bigger than ours. The only way that wouldn’t make sense to do is if we were extracting *less* than our military budget out of them, at which point we *should* use our military budget for debt relief, instead!
> Oops, Russia just launched all their nukes because they obviously couldn’t win the war. You don't seriously believe the Russians are going to destroy the entire world over a 6% tax, do you? I am unconvinced. >Spend all our military money on debt and it’s gone in 17 years with no other changes needed. We need our military or else China and Russia will take over the world. We are barely able to hold this thing together as it is. >then it would be preferable to them not to give us the money, Then we just blow up enough countries until the others get the message and pay up. Then they won't have enough money to invest into military expansion and we buy American hegemony another 50 years.
"We spend almost $1 trillion per year on our military, more than 3 times what the next country (China) spends and we have by far the strongest navy in the world." Do you not think declaring open war on the entire world might change other countries' budgetary priorities? "The United States should send our navy out into the world charging protection money for ships transporting goods on the global oceans" Where are we basing that navy now that you've declared war on the entire world? You're aware ships require bases? "Considering the stablity and prosperity our control of the global oceans offers the tiny, irrelevant countries of the world like Germany or India" Did you make a typo? "I unironically believe that we should do this" Then you should present it in a way as to be less likely to be mistaken for trolling.
> Do you not think declaring open war on the entire world might change other countries' budgetary priorities? Not if they're paying 6% annually in direct transfers to us. and we can blow up their shipyards whenever we feel like it. > Where are we basing that navy now that you've declared war on the entire world? You're aware ships require bases? Maybe we can give them a "friends and family" discount and cut their tax to 3%. >Did you make a typo? Nope.
I gotta say, this is one of the funnier threads I've ever seen. I feel inspired to 'embrace' the flaws of our oligarchy like you have. Speaking of budget balancing.. Maybe we can rent out our school shooters to Israel to recoup some $ lost funding their genocide. They'd be able to do what they love, kill children, and since Israel considers everyone in Gaza a terrorist, we can charge a flat rate of a couple hundred bucks per head and I'm sure they'd gladly pay it since their troops are too scared to actually get close to the citizens there for fear of Hamas. Our school shooters are definitely more Brave than the IDF soldiers and may inspire them with their courage so that they don't have hang ups like staying alive while they murder civilians indiscriminately. The money raised could go into a fund for US teachers to purchase tranquilizer guns to use on future school shooters. We don't want them to be killed since they're too valuable, since when they're done in Gaza, they can always come back and become agents for the American President, like when Nixon had the Cuban CIA assets attack Daniel Ellsburg (the Pentagon Papers whistleblower), with orders to 'fully incapacitate him.' The surviving school shooters,(and future ones as well, there will probably never be a shortage), could really do a lot of bad around the world while bringing in good profits. They'd be enabled to make a difference for democracy. Something to think about.
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Literally just tax the wealthy people. Increase the tax on top wealth and fund the IRS properly to get the taxes already owed and you'll see a massive increase in revenue, more than enough to make up the deficit.
Can you give me a single piece of advice that that is politically possible? Show me a path to 60 votes in the Senate. I don't think you can because all of those people are in the pocket of lobbyists. I can show you a hundred ways to 51 votes for war though. Look at the AUMF against Iraq in 2003. That was a mentally regarded war and our representatives from both parties voted for it like clapping seals.
Yeah! I never understood why we can't tax rich people. There's a lot of celebrities and businesses worth millions and make millions and yet we can't just take a little bit of that? We can, America just doesn't want to upset the wealthy. If we just taxed the wealthy instead of the middle and poor class, we might actually accomplish something
> The United States is currently running a deficit of almost $2 trillion. That's a lot of money and we are probably unable to pay this off without raising taxes This is a misunderstanding of what government debt is. It's not like a loan to make a purchase, it's more like an interest bearing investment: The people lending the US money are investing in US economic growth and expect a return on investment. To "pay off" the debt would piss these investors off (they are expecting a certain predictable return on their investment) and would potentially do more damage to the US economy than your piracy idea as people wouldn't trust to invest in the US anymore.
We've been in a huge economic boom for like 15 years and have only been running bigger and bigger deficits. Our only ways out are to devalue the US Dollar which is a no-go or massive austerity which would send us into a permanent recession just like Europe. >your piracy idea as people wouldn't trust to invest in the US anymore. Where else are they going to keep their money? We are the only safe haven and the world's economic engine.
If the US started doing global piracy we wouldn't really be a safe haven anymore, would we? I'm guessing other countries would most likely start working together against us and while the US military is big I don't think it is big enough to take on the rest of the world.
It would take China more than a hundred years to match the US Navy in tonnage at their current rate of construction. We have a massive advantage right now, time to press it before we fall into the Thucydides Trap
Its not the US vs China though, its the US vs the world.
More to warfare than just sheer numbers....
>We've been in a huge economic boom for like 15 years and have only been running bigger and bigger deficits. This makes sense- the bigger the economy, the bigger the deficit. we don't need to rein it in, that's not how it works.
The US military might be strong, but a global rebellion is beyond even their power. No ports, attacks on supply ships trying to supply far flung battle groups, no semi conductors for new munitions, a complete shut down of imports into the US, crews destroying their cargo to keep it out of US hands, decades long guerrilla warfare, soldiers who would refuse to follow illegal or unethical commands, possibility of civil war, the list is endless for the ways this idea goes sideways.
let's actually debate this. give me a list of countries that would join the rebellion and we can war game this. we don't need to send boots on the ground, we can just bomb them from the air. attacking Countries with nukes would be off the table, maybe we can just take them out of the plan. but most of the world is just too small and poor to really stand up to us. Even the nuclear powers like India are not going to end the world over a trade war. We can just stop and search their ships far from their coast and bomb strategic rail choke points in third countries to paralyze them and force them to trade by sea, they would be very hard pressed to do anything
How are you going to stop attacks on your supply ships? What will you use for semi conductors to replace those lost or destroyed in battle? How will you prevent soldiers from disobeying orders? What about generals or battle groups who do not believe in your plan? The rest of the world doesn't really need to stand up to you. Just refuse to acknowledge your demands. Inflation would be insane for the US in a scenario like this. Critical supplies would be severely limited. Food, fuel, and manufactured goods would be in short supply. The US is a powerhouse, but it is not big enough to hold the world for ransom.
> What will you use for semi conductors to replace those lost or destroyed in battle? We already have Taiwan and we're building out fabs here. Piracy profits will help accelerate reshoring of this stuff. > How will you prevent soldiers from disobeying orders? What about generals or battle groups who do not believe in your plan? We already have protocols for this. We've been committing war crimes for like 60 years and no one cared. Nothing will change now. >Inflation would be insane for the US in a scenario like this. Food, fuel, and manufactured goods would be in short supply. Not if we can flood our own market with free foreign goods at will. >The US is a powerhouse, but it is not big enough to hold the world for ransom. I think we are. You need to present me a list of non-US Allied countries that could actually stand up to us and dethrone us. China, India, and Russia combined couldn't do anything except launch nukes, which they're not gonna do. The rest of the world is a non-factor.
Your faith in the US military and lack of concern for the combined might of the world are both dreadfully wrong. The world has banded together to fight a common enemy, and this time would be no different. Countries around the world would work together to stop this, and it wouldn't take a direct confrontation to achieve it. Simple denial of assets would be enough to halt the US war machine. Look to any war fought against a guerrilla force and look at the outcome. You know every country would oppose this and offer resistance. Soviets, China, India, the EU, and more would oppose the US. It would be a war of attrition that the US would lose. They are no longer a manufacturing powerhouse and building the infrastructure needed to achieve that would take decades.
You can change my mind if you can give me a list of countries who are not already treaty allies that could realistically stop our navy on the high seas without nuclear weapons. That would actually change my mind.
Treaty allies would turn against the US. With no foreign bases, the reach of the navy would be very limited. I do not need to name a country that could stop the US as the entire world would oppose them. If that were to fail, the world would be broken up into large and small powers fighting the US and each other. Russia, China, Japan, and a host of other countries would band together and target one carrier group at a time and destroy it. Guerrilla warfare has a funny way of working. US in Vietnam, Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and a slew of other conflicts that forced a larger army into retreat are ample proof of its effectiveness.
I'm not talking a land invasion you're just talking about something else entirely. What combination of [these countries](https://chuckhillscgblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/naval-balance.jpg) is capable of stopping us? Honestly, that would change my mind.
I am not talking about a land invasion but a campaign to control the oceans. The US might start out strong, but all those nations combined could stop the US navy juggernaut. Take over all US land based ports, deny access to any port in the world, and start harassing the US fleet. They would start to run low on supplies and fuel and be forced into a fighting retreat. Since the World fleet would still have ports and supply chains much closer than the US fleet they could run a campaign of harassing and whittling down the US fleet who could not stand and fight until they were within a few hundred miles of their coast, at which point they would either be spread extremely thin or bunched up on one coast or the other and would be unable to venture out beyond the supply chain they could establish. The World Fleet then attacks the supply chain and one battle group at a time. The US would be worn down slowly and eventually destroyed. There are more ship building yards outside the US than there are in the US. The world fleet could supply new ships faster than the US could. There are also more factories globally that could supply munitions and supplies faster.
the US couldn't even beat Vietnam in a war and had to surrender in Afghanistan
> How are you going to stop attacks on your supply ships? Give me a list of countries. I asked that before and you didn't give me it. Come on. Gimme.
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I agree with the very first paragraph so much The rest not so much, no country will or can even kick the US out of the UN, especially not so simply. Any actual attempt would probably break apart the UN And switching a world accepted currency like the US to any other one is imo impossible these days, and any attempt will take generations to really settle in Def. Agree with a big change in trade and bsuiness/manufacturing relations though And yea this post somehow is overestimating the power of the US by soo much
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You can’t be kicked out of the UN; there are no mechanisms to kick out a permanent member.
This is like the airbud rule that there isn’t a rule that says dogs can’t play basketball. Friend, if we are at war with every other member of the UN then the rules don’t matter. Put a gun to your landlord’s head and you’re on the street whether or not your lease includes a ‘no attempted murder’ clause.
Who is the landlord? Hint, where is the UN building?
That's one UN building. They could easily move the whole shebang to their IMO offices in London, or a different office in Geneva, etc, etc. Heck, I'd imagine any shitty airport hotel with a decent size conference room could put something together for them at short notice. This is not the "gotcha" some folk think it is..
At some point, you are just setting up a second UN without America in it; a different set of diplomats, a different set of rules, a different set of places to meet, and all of that. That's fine; they can do that. But the actual UN as an institution itself is fundamentally tied to America.
Via a building. People can always go and meet somewhere else, it doesn't have to be in New York. To be fair, as parts of OP's plan go, this is by far the smallest point going. This whole thing reeks of too much CoD, Cheetos and Moutain Dew
And the permanent seat that says that the rules of UN as a club don't apply to the permanent members. And the fact that via the building, everyone who regularly shows up there lives in New York! If the US is going rogue, guards can be posted at the airport to prevent anyone from leaving. The OP's plan isn't going to work, obviously, but I don't see this UN doing much.
Oh, more treaty violations. Wonderful....
When you are extorting the rest of the world, well…
Are you serious? As if email isn’t a thing. “Hey America is probably going to hold us hostage or kill us if we don’t bend over for them, maybe let’s go somewhere else?”
> Countries can't just waltz into someone else's territory like it's a buffet line at a cheap diner. It's called international law, and it frowns upon piracy, which is pretty much what you're suggesting here. If your reply is, ‘yeah so what? What are they going to do?’ They kick us out of the UN, abandon the US dollar as the backing of their currency systems and switch to the BRICS system, and cut off trade with the US. Yeah. Okay. So what. First of all, we have a permanent seat on the security council so the UN can't do anything. Half of our trade is with Mexico and Canada who are our lapdogs. The poor nations of the world (Europe and Asia especially) are completely dependent on North America for everything. All the biggest tech companies in the world, global finance, military industrial complex, blah blah blah, is all here. They need access to our market, our capital, and our navy to guarantee their shipping. We can monetize that and the fact that we haven't done so already shows our leaders are stupid or corrupt. >We no longer can import top soil to support our agriculture, we lose access to the semiconductors that our military and infrastructure is built off of, we lose access to the lithium mines our batteries are built off of. We can just literally threaten them and all but about 5 countries on earth would roll over because they can't hope to stand up to us. Be realistic. >Look at the supplychain flow of our biggest companies: Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA - they’re all dependent on overseas labor and supplies. We can negotiate for that on a master-tributary basis. If Taiwan doesn't want to pay us for the privilege of building our semiconductors we can just threaten to bomb them and use the money we take from other countries to build more fabs here. Not that complicated. >10% of our GDP vanishes overnight, minimum. How? > Not to mention a swath of US citizens overseas are taken as prisoners as a gamble to combat US aggression - look at Russia doing this to US citizens now. Not a big deal in the global scheme of things. >Riots and unrest will break out domestically, political gridlock will intensify, and culturally the US will be in chaos as it tries to make sense of this failed new world order we tried to impose. And this is assuming that our global blackmail doesn’t kick off a domino effect that leads to a nuclear exchange. This is all speculation. Not to mention that political gridlock is how we got to have $35 trillion in debt and no way to pay it back. But we do have the largest military in the world and about 50 years to bully other countries into paying us back for it before someone can stand up to us. Time to collect on our investments and try to cement our hegemony for another century. >Furthermore, even if the previously mentioned factors weren’t in play - the US doesn’t have the naval power to essentially bully the entire planet into submission. Since the end of the Cold War, we’ve scaled back our number of destroyers considerably in exchange for fewer but larger ships and aircraft carriers, meaning there are too many blind spots for us to realistically cover everything effectively. Don’t believe me? Look at the piracy in the Mediterranean we’ve tried and failed to prevent. This is a good point. This is why I brought up the threat of force against countries who don't play ball. We have a hard time protecting commerce at scale but we do have the capability to basically choose any country on earth and just destroy it with our aircraft carrier groups. If a small irrelevant country like Tunisia or Bangladesh doesn't want to play ball, we can just send them back to the stone age by bombing all their port infrastructure, strategic bridges, waste management, water treatment, etc. (which were probably paid for with American capital). Other countries will realize that we are running a protection racket and will play ball. This is how a mafia works and unless you have a global policeman, the mafia wins out in the end. We are playing the role of policeman, we should be playing the mafioso.
This is a novella of unrealistic bs that sounds like it’s informed by call of duty fan fiction and military YouTube channels. UN rules go out the window if we literally threaten every member there. Try holding a gun to your landlord’s head and then say, ‘you can’t kick me out because we signed a lease.’ UN won’t mean shit - more than likely it’ll be redesigned with the rest of the world in a reverse uno card nato system to keep folks safe from the US. You say to be realistic when it comes to the viability of us blackmailing less powerful countries for necessary resources. Obviously you’re unfamiliar with salted earth tactics. If we go in guns blazing to try and extort these resources, more than likely the countries will destroy the infrastructure on their retreat to make sure we can’t have them. Same thing happened to Germany when they tried invading Russia, and it’s the same reason why China attempting what you’ve suggested with Taiwan hasn’t made any progress - because they don’t have the means to build such advanced chip manufacturing sites and neither do we, and everyone knows that if Taiwan really had their ass to the fire they could neuter the entire industry and send technology back a decade. You ask how 10% of our GDP vanishes. That much of our economy is conservatively based on imports. Most put it closer to 15%. You say it’s only speculation that there would be social unrest in the US if we began privateering the entire globe. You must be high - we’re losing our minds over Israel and Gaza right now and that’s something we’re not even directly involved in. Just wait until US troops start dying to rob other countries many our citizens likely still have family in. Just wait until terror attacks start unfolding in record number domestically. And prisoners of war are not a small thing - maybe read some history, specifically the Iran Hostage crises. We have the strongest military, but it’s nowhere near large enough to police the entirety of a hostile world. Likely this little experiment would fall apart within a week.
>They kick us out of the UN How? We can veto any attempts to do so. Why would we vote ourselves out?
And more to the point, if someone were to try to kick out anyone from the UN, the order would have to be physically carried out by the NYPD. The UN is not designed to defend against America as the rogue state.
You talk as if security council rules don’t go out the window when we’re essentially at war with every other member. This wouldn’t be like Russia getting sanctioned or shadow-blocked from UN proceedings, this would be us walking into a room where we’re blatantly attempting to extort every single person in attendance.
>this would be us walking into a room where we’re blatantly attempting to extort every single person in attendance. While American police officers are there to uh, provide physical security. The room is physically in New York!
So what? Is there some natural law Im unaware of that forces UN members to physically show up even when they know they’re probably going to be taken hostage? Your logic is equivalent to saying, “shit the office is on fire but my cubicle is in there - guess I have to burn to death.”
You understand that the diplomats that work in the UN building representing each country all live in New York, right?
Some do - but these aren’t the heads of state or actual decision makers. If a rep held hostage in New York says, “yeah we’ll pay” that doesn’t mean the nation is actually going to pay. What happens is one ugly session where these reps are taken hostage, their home countries denounce and cut ties with the US before and then rehouse the new US-free UN somewhere else. Nobody is showing up in New York after that.
I am talking about the decision making within the UN itself. America votes in the UN, but it isn’t Joe Biden who cast the vote: it is the American representative to the UN. If that person doesn’t listen to Biden, Biden can appoint a new one, but point is, someone posted at the UN makes the votes. This obviously won’t affect their home countries, but again, this is why the UN as an institution can’t used against the US going rogue. They have to set up a new one with new everything.
Then we’re arguing semantics - whether it is called the UN or rebranded as something else, located in New York or Berlin or London, it doesn’t matter. The point is that the US is no longer a part of the international decision making body which would be one of many reasons why OP’s plan would fail.
I wouldn’t bet on a new UN forming, to be honest. The UN, and the League of Nations before it, were both American ideas that only happened because America pushed for it. I can’t see someone else playing a similar role while in an active crisis. There would be so much bickering about the rules of the new UN that it would be hard to form. That said, OP’s plan still wouldn’t work.
Yeah, and we would still be able to walk into that room and veto everything. If they want to throw out the rules and proceed anyway, they no longer have the legitimacy the UN offers, and are just falling back on their own militaries for backing anyway.
Money isn't really worth anything without goods and services attached to it. You'd have to somehow seize those without disrupting global trade. Which is basically impossible. You would trash the world economy costing us 10 times more than you could possibly extract doing this.
1) Half of our trade is with Mexico and Canada so we are not that exposed. 2) The rest of the world understands the principles you lay out here as well, which is why they would just roll over and pay the tax.
Pay with what? Money is useless in this scenario. It has to be backed by goods and services. You have to either seize means of production or seize natural resources. Both of which are major headaches and produce more trouble than they are worth. It's cheaper to just import a bunch of high IQ people from India and China and let them build means of production for us. Which is exactly what we're doing.
I'm curious what happens when we piss off someone with nukes who decides to use them. Do we all just die in nuclear winter?
But why would that happen?
Cause we are pirating their ships or their allies ships?
State piracy has existed for a long time, why would they use nukes over this?
State piracy has not existed to the extent you are suggesting nor has it happened in a time where a much smaller army had an effective means to fight back against a much larger army (i.e. a nuke). Did you suggest like blowing up Italy? If I was a European country who saw a neighbor get blown up by the worlds largest pirate fleet, I'd consider nuking the pirate fleet.
A nuke is a big escalation compared to finding some way to dodge our tax considering Mutually Assured Destruction. >Did you suggest like blowing up Italy? If I was a European country who saw a neighbor get blown up by the worlds largest pirate fleet, I'd consider nuking the pirate fleet. If France or Britain complain we can just bribe them, right?
>A nuke is a big escalation compared to finding some way to dodge our tax considering Mutually Assured Destruction. Dodge our tax? You can't dodge an aircraft carrier blowing up your ports. >If France or Britain complain we can just bribe them, right? So we go out and pirate the world for the purposes of balancing our budget. Then we spend all the extra money bribing every country with a nuke putting our budget in the negative again? How much money do you think it will cost to bribe all those countries? And I assume we wouldn't pirate the people we are bribing right (or else why would they accept the bribe)? So that is more lost revenue from this scheme. And what about those countries that have take a principled stance against the US and reject the bribe anyway (like Russia or China or North Korea)?
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I'm having fun engaging with everyone's perspectives. I'm glad you are enjoying it as well. Would love to hear your thoughts.
If I can't find any money I suppose I'll just steal it from you.
Yes
Seems like a lot of effort and needlessly putting lives at risk. If you're concerned about a $2 trillion deficit, why not just print up a shiny new $2 trillion dollar bill and balance the budget that way. Literally a 2 minute solution to this alleged problem.
Hyperinflation
$2 trillion debt vs. additional $2 trillion in cash and no debt has the exact same impact on the economy. They are literally, economically, the same thing.
You understand that when you devalue the currency like that you will have massive macroeconomic issues beyond the debt?
You don't understand macro economics. The U.S. issuing $2 trillion in debt adds $2 trillion to the economy. The U.S. printing (and circulating) 2 trillion $1 bills adds $2 trillion to the economy. There is literally zero economic difference.
Yeah neither is good. We should be running a surplus without devaluing our currency and impoverishing our own people..
You don't understand economics.
Well what's wrong with my claim, I'd like to hear it.
And you expect this to have positive impacts on global fast trade?
Absolutely. The United States already secures the global oceans for international shipping. It's about time we got our due for doing this free labor for the nations of the world who don't spend $800 billion annually on defense to protect their own shipping. And a small 6% tax on global commerce will encourage Americans to continue guaranteeing the safety of international trade for years to come instead of retreating into isolationism. Plus, If the United States debt problem is solved, we will see a rapid rise in the American economy and Americans will have more money to invest abroad in our partner countries.
No, the status quo is global ocean trade and the USA already benefits from this. You're proposing bricking that with world war 3. That will lose us allies, slow trade, and choke the supply of your nation that depends on global fast trade. That means trillions in losses. You'd rather have world war than raise taxes and invest in America lol
>No, the status quo is global ocean trade and the USA already benefits from this. The status quo is the USA subsidizing global trade by spending 3% of our GDP on defense. > You're proposing bricking that with world war 3. No nation can compete with the US navy on the high seas and the thread of us stealing all their stuff would be enough to bully them into paying us, at least for long enough for us to balance our budget. >That will lose us allies, slow trade, and choke the supply of your nation that depends on global fast trade. We don't really need allies. We spend more on defense than the next 11 countries combined. We'll be fine. And we don't really trade that much as a nation. Half of our trade is done with Canada and Mexico, so we can include them in on the privateering if they like and form a continental bloc that no one could ever hope to compete with. > You'd rather have world war than raise taxes and invest in America lol **I think this is where my proposal is actually more realistic than yours.** There is no way the current congress will be able to raise taxes. An entire political party and most of the other party are in the pocket of big business. A big reason why Fitch downgraded the US credit rating from AAA to AA+ is that general political gridlock and that we have no serious plan to combat the debt. You cannot get 60% of the Senate to break a filibuster to raise taxes. However, recent history has shown that the Congress will vote for war, even unnecessary war. The Iraq War passed the Senate with 77 votes. That's a thundering majority for the war party. And my plan would enrich defense contractors, who have strong lobbying arms in DC. **Unironically, there is a higher chance of my plan being passed than just raising taxes on the rich a few percent.**
Luckily for the world, none of that is true. The US isn't subsidizing defense, it's just wasting too much money for the benefit of greedy lobbyists. Our allies pay for defense too. The rest of nato even without the usa still spends more than Russia and China combined. They also help the usa even when we start stupid wars based on lies. The usa just wastes that much more. >There is no way the current congress will be able to raise taxes There is a strange fallacy here and I wish there was a name for it. Your imagined solution requires so much never- before- seen political power so that you can get away with unilateral global war and multinational invasion of treatied allies. But you think you don't have the political power to raise taxes as the current party in government literally already did.
> Luckily for the world, none of that is true. The US isn't subsidizing defense, it's just wasting too much money for the benefit of greedy lobbyists. We are fighting Somali pirates and the Houthis. All of this goes to protect international commerce, which we are not all that engaged in as half of our trade is with Mexico and Canada.
As I said, treaties. Fighting Somali pirates and houthis, which is a new, recent, and small budget thing, is vastly less than starting world war 3 over ocean trade. Please reply to what I said. Your world war 3 plan requires an absurd level of political control... which you could use to just directly fix the problem with taxes on the rich and investing in American prosperity.
> As I said, treaties. We can just pull out of them or ignore them. We already ignore plenty of human rights treaties and conventions to arm countries like Ukraine or Israel. Israel kills a schoolbus of children like every day but we keep sending the bombs (for free). We can just apply the same disregard for international law to our own interests instead of Israel and Ukraine. > Please reply to what I said. Your world war 3 plan requires an absurd level of political control... which you could use to just directly fix the problem with taxes on the rich and investing in American prosperity. Can you clarify your question? I think I have addressed this before but if you expand a little more I can too.
I don't know how to make my point more obvious. With the power and total national control necessary to force your nation into sustaining world war 3, destroy international trade, breach treaties, and invade good allies, just invest in America instead.
Why do you keep saying World War 3? I'm talking about a 6% tax on global shipping, no one is going to start World War 3 over that. >just invest in America instead. We have no money to invest and we are going bankrupt.
>which we are not all that engaged in as half of our trade is with Mexico and Canada. 1. That means 50% is NOT with Mexico and China and therefore significantly impacted by our influence internationally. 2. The US benefits tremendously from being the global reserve and trading currency. That disappears without US involvement abroad.
While ur post is deleted I just wanted to point out a simple flaw in your idea You are assuming the nations are fighting alone against the US, thus the US is much stronger military wise than most sure But not only will the US lose allies, those allies will no doubt work together against the US. The USA draws its power from the willingness of other countries, abuse it too much and there will be an obvious revolt. I can see enemy countries join together to take down the US and it won‘t be that difficult. Thats how past empires fell and that will not stop by the US either There is no way in hell you wrote that while being serious right?
>We spend more on defense than the next 11 countries combined. That's because your invoices are a bloated mess of a million hands taking a fist full. Outspending is not the same as out performing. China's navy alone out numbers the USA. They form an alliance with Australia and the US looses 4 vital military bases in Aus. China is Australia's top trade partner. Throw in other chinese trade partners New Zealand, Japan and Indonesia as allies and the US wont make a dent in the pacific.
Congress will raise taxes if we vote for left wingers. It’s that simple. We just need to vote. We don’t need to go to war lol.
How's vooting working out so far? Trump will probably be back in office in January and if he's not, it'll be Netanyahu's #1 simp (Biden). Americans don't vote for left-wingers.
Excellent? What are you talking about?
I'm saying that I don't think the US will ever elect a 60% leftist congress so taxes will not be meaningfully raised.
Then you’re straight up ignorant. The only reason we are not doing so at the moment is because people like yourself don’t vote for democrats. The democrats are moderate right now because that’s the only option that gets enough votes. If we get 3-4 presidential election wins in a row, including the house and congress in midterm elections, then we can elect further and further left wing people, and have them still get support. Think of it this way, our options are this: would you like to move the country to the left, or would you like to move the country to the right? If we choose to move to the left multiple times in a row, we will find ourselves pretty far over to the left. If we take a step to the left, then a step to the right, then a step to the left, then a step to the right, we are stuck in the middle.
I live in a safe blue state and haven't voted for a major party candidate in any of the last 3 elections. My vote is inconsequential. You have to understand that a simple majority of the congress and the presidency is not enough to raise taxes on the rich. You need a 60% majority to break a filibuster and you forget that a large section of the Democratic party senators and congresspeople are in the pocket of big business. They will stand against efforts to raise taxes on the rich. However, in recent history, Congress has shown that it will vote for any act of war that comes before it if you beat the war drum hard enough. So actually, privateering is a more realistic option than waiting for some non-existent socialist left to take over in the US.
The US is not the number 1 country in the world. #1 is Switzerland #2 is Canada and #3 is Sweden. The US is #5 after Australia. As a Canadian we make fun of delusional Americans like you.
Name 5 Swiss tech giants
IBM, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, Logitech
Want to reread that list
How about Swedish
Hexagon, Spotify, Klarman, Sinch, Trustly, Cellink. America will never be a #1 country again. The only people saying America is #1 is Americans. Everyone outside of America laughs at that shit.
We just need to raise taxes on our rich to a fraction of what they were in 1980. We have huge deficits because of repeated huge Republican tax cuts on the wealthy that were premised on the idea that they would pay for themselves.
Our tax as a share of GDP was higher in 2022 than it was at any point in the 1980s
That was a peak year -- I just did the math, and 2023 and 1984 are both just over 16% of the economy. (2022 was over 19%.). Perhaps accounting things that delayed payments during the pandemic caused the jump -- 21% jump in revenues 2021-2022. Revenues in 1979, before the Reagan tax cuts, were over 17.5% by my calculation. Also, as far as I can tell, these tax numbers include social security tax, which has increased over time as that program has needed more revenue, and also includes medicare, whose taxes have also increased for the same reason, which explains why total revenues are the same percentage as 1984 after the Bush and Trump tax cuts.
See: [here](https://reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1dojns0/cmv_the_us_should_balance_its_budget_by_stealing/laa8gmu/)
That’s how you get world war 3. And that will blow up the deficit. So while your solution might have worked for ancient empires, it will not work today. Also American would stop any leader who attempts to do just that.
See: [here](https://reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1dojns0/cmv_the_us_should_balance_its_budget_by_stealing/laa8gmu/)
So you’re okay killing innocent people just to take their money. There is an ethical dilemma inherit in your plan. You will not get the public onboard.
I never said to kill people and I think it should be done as peacefully as possible. If we are to strike a port facility or a factory, we should call ahead to evacuate the facility before we begin our strike. In any case, I don't think it would be necessary since 99% of countries would just pay up.
You would have to kill people. There is no way around it.
We have people dying in this country too because of suicide because of underfunded services and drug overdoses and we need revenue to solve these problems. The gridlocked Congress is not going to meaningfully raise taxes or cut spending but have shown that they will vote for war whenever asked.
So you’re okay killing people to save American lives? The nazi’s literally made those same arguments to justify their invasions.
> So you’re okay killing people to save American lives? Yeah so is everyone else in the country. What do you think the war on terror was about? We've already had this debate and one side won it decisively.
There is a difference between eliminating would be aggressors and becoming the aggressor.
Why do you value the lives of people born near you over the lives of people born further from you?
Why do you value 6% of foreigners' trade over the lives people from your own country?
If the additional 6% value you're stealing is saving lives in America then its lack is also costing lives elsewhere.
Not our problem, though, is it?
Soldiers don’t need to follow unlawful orders. You’ll have soldiers refusing orders en masse and a near total collapse of command.
I never claimed it would be unlawful. I support expanding the Authorization for Use of Military force to allow the Commander-in-Chief to order the armed forces to use any means necessary to regulate international trade pursuant to the terms I've lain out above. I imagine our soldiers and sailors will be eager to collect their share of the booty.
Blowing up ports and fleets to make an example out of a country is illegal. Disrupting international trade is illegal. Unlawfully confiscated goods shipped internationally is illegal. Basically every part of your plan is illegal. You might even be illegal at the rate you’re going. Tell me, who’s going to buy all these illegally confiscated goods if every country in the world is now our enemy? You can’t make money off goods just sitting on container ships in the Port of Los Angeles.
> Blowing up ports and fleets to make an example out of a country is illegal. Disrupting international trade is illegal. Unlawfully confiscated goods shipped internationally is illegal. Who says that? International treaties? Just pull out of them or stop enforcing them. It's not like the US respects international law when we invade Iraq for no reason or give Israel cluster bombs to kill children with. If we're going to ignore international law and be a corrupt hegemon, we should at least do it in a financially savvy way. > Tell me, who’s going to buy all these illegally confiscated goods if every country in the world is now our enemy? You can’t make money off goods just sitting on container ships in the Port of Los Angeles. They can buy them back on the global market. The United States spends more money on it's military than the next 11 nations combined. If we count all of NATO, that's $1 trillion per year on defense. If we give our allies a discount on their share of the tribute to be paid, there's no way any country in the world could stand up to us. We could end China by just blockading oil shipments to China through the Strait of Malacca and their navy doesn't have the range to attack us there. They'd be wise to just pay up.
The rest of the world allies against us, refuses to buy anything American, or any of our stolen goods, and you hasten the collapse of American society in such an utterly complete and rapid way that it breaks the sound barrier. The US navy can’t simultaneously blockade, privateer, and defeat the entire world.
Can you explain how we would collapse? No country in the western hemisphere has a military that could hope to compete with ours so that entire hemisphere is safe. We control the Pacific ocean and have bases all around the world. Most countries in the world are pitifully small and I think we could bully some bigger countries like Russia, China, or India into paying up by choking off their access to strategic choke points like the gulf of Hormuz, Malacca Strait, or Red Sea. The costs of raising a fleet big enough to fight us would be much more than a small 6% duty on their international trade.
We are able to control the pacific because of our allies and bases. We are able to control the North Atlantic because of our NATO allies and base. We are able to control the gulf because of our allies and bases. If no one can trust us, and now we aren’t running joint military ops with South Korea, Australia, gulf countries, et al, and we don’t have international bases anymore, and half our military has either deserted, or is imprisoned for refusing unlawful orders, then it’s physically impossible to spread ourselves so thin. You’ve basically eliminated like 3/4 of our capacity. We’re not able to literally be everywhere at once without our allies.
> We are able to control the pacific because of our allies and bases. We are able to control the North Atlantic because of our NATO allies and base. We are able to control the gulf because of our allies and bases. Okay, I agree with you. Maybe we can give those countries that have strategic bases like Japan, Korea, or Qatar a 50% discount on yearly tribute. They depend on us for their security even more than we depend on them for bases and will pay up. These are rich countries. >If no one can trust us Already no one trusts us, look at global opinion polling. >half our military has either deserted, or is imprisoned for refusing unlawful orders I don't see any reason why soldiers would desert when they can just take their cut of the booty. 10% of $100 Trillion is life-changing money for our service members.
>Okay, I agree with you. Maybe we can give those countries that have strategic bases like Japan, Korea, or Qatar a 50% discount on yearly tribute. Were spread too thin, and since we’ve already attacked these countries and their allies, each one of them tells us to fuck off and come fight them for it. Which we can’t do since we don’t have any bases, allies, and have severely depleted and diluted our manpower trying to simultaneously fight everyone, steal everything, blockade every port, and police hundreds of different shipping routes. >They depend on us for their security even more than we depend on them for bases and will pay up. These are rich countries. They aren’t going to keep depending on us when we are at war with the entire world. That’s absurd. >Already no one trusts us, look at global opinion polling. Wrong. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/06/27/overall-opinion-of-the-u-s/ >I don't see any reason why soldiers would desert when they can just take their cut of the booty. Lying to the country and telling them Iraq was responsible for 9/11, and bombing the shit out of Italy, where many service men and women have friends and families are two completely different things. >10% of $100 Trillion is life-changing money for our service members. No one is buying any of the goods we stole. Perishables rot in the port. Electronics sit untouched in shipping containers. 100% of zero dollars is exactly zero dollars.
You're strawmanning my argument. 1) We can reduce the tribute we demand from our NATO allies in exchange for keeping our bases there. We already de facto subsidize them when you consider how few of them have been meeting their defense obligations. So we would absolutely still retain our ability to touch any square inch of the Earth's surface. 2) I am not talking about a land war anywhere. I'm talking about forcing countries who trade by sea to pay us a duty for the privilege. If they refuse, we can cripple them quite easily by attacking strategic infrastructure like ports, dams, power plants, water treatment plants, and so forth. We don't need tons of munitions for this and few countries really have the long range missiles needed to retaliate with great effect. Those countries that do have that capability, we could just not demand tribute from them. If a third party wants to transfer military hardware to them, we can attack them en route or enact further sanctions like banning tech companies from doing business with them. All of this punishment would incure a greater cost than the 6% we are asking for. If you can give me a list of countries who could realistically resist this, we can talk more about specifics. >Already no one trusts us, look at global opinion polling. >Wrong. 1) This is just a favorability poll. It has little to do with how they view our role as a global hegemon. And when Trump or Bush Jr. were in office all of these numbers were underwater anyway so this makes me think it's largely based on biased media reporting influencing public opinion. We are a bipolar country and most people around the world understand that. 2) Most of the countries on that list are outright American allies. Not representative of the wider world. If you showed me a poll from Turkey, Lebanon, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia or other countries, you would probably get differing results. 3) If the world really trusted us, Iran would have renewed the Iran deal with us but we destroyed our legitimacy there by ripping it up. See: we are a bipolar country. >Lying to the country and telling them Iraq was responsible for 9/11, and bombing the shit out of Italy, where many service men and women have friends and families are two completely different things. And still nobody deserted. In fact, many of our soldiers were all too happy to commit war crimes and atrocities without being ordered, which shows that they don't care. >No one is buying any of the goods we stole. Perishables rot in the port. Electronics sit untouched in shipping containers. 100% of zero dollars is exactly zero dollars. Literally not our problem. It will drive up global commodity prices and we can use those goods to stabilize prices here at home while everyone else suffers. If they want to buy foodstuffs, they can buy it from American farmers who will sell at inflated prices into the market they created. This would extend the sunset of the monopolar American world order by decades at least.
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Our debt wouldn't grow because we'd take money from other countries to pay it down. If other countries collapse, that isn't our problem. Only about half our trade comes from non-NAFTA countries. Not our business. Time for them to pay up.
To /u/aakdgaitsgduvdqogd87, *Your post is under consideration for removal for violating Rule B.* In our experience, the best conversations genuinely consider the other person’s perspective. Here are some techniques for keeping yourself honest: - Instead of only looking for flaws in a comment, be sure to engage with the commenters’ strongest arguments — not just their weakest. - Steelman rather than strawman. When summarizing someone’s points, look for the most reasonable interpretation of their words. - Avoid moving the goalposts. Reread the claims in your OP or first comments and if you need to change to a new set of claims to continue arguing for your position, you might want to consider acknowledging the change in view with a [delta](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=changemyview&utm_content=t5_2w2s8) before proceeding. - Ask questions and really try to understand the other side, rather than trying to prove why they are wrong. Please also take a moment to review our [Rule B](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_b) guidelines and _really_ ask yourself - am I exhibiting any of these behaviors? If so, see what you can do to get the discussion back on track. Remember, the goal of CMV is to try and **understand** why others think differently than you do.
The US already did that lmao. What a selfish, american world view. You sir are an evil person, change your views in life, the world doesn't revolve around you nor the US
This sounds like *checks notes* "Imperialism and Colonialism". Gee, you'd think if this was such a good idea countries would have tried this before.....
*SLOW CLAP* I think we've found the worst idea ever on Reddit. And brother, that's saying something: the bar's MIGHTY fucking low....
Just so you know, money isn't a real thing. It's not gold bullion, for example.
? Neither is gold bullion if you are tryna argue that our way of money isn‘t real but the trading of gold is I mean sure gold itself is real Just like dollar bills are But the value we give them is of our own making, it might as well not exist
r/noncredibledefense would love this if you just turned it into a power point.
Adolf Hitler tried that and see where it got him
How did Homelander get a Reddit account?
Isn't it happening alerady?
This will unlikely solve the deficit, since everyone will fight back as hard as they can, costing more than we're getting. HOWEVER, it might hasten the one world government by sacrificing The USA for the greater good.
It's difficult to fight back very hard against a bomb
This may come as a shock, but the USA isn't the only country with a military.. Just because ours is larger, stronger, and better funded doesn't mean it's invincible.
Not invincible, but strong enough that it heavily weighs on the scale when some other countries are thinking about taking action against us.
Our military couldn't even build a dock in Gaza. They ain't winning no wars
We could easily win wars if we were actually willing to win them. Unfortunately they're handicapped politically by people who don't like actually doing what it takes to win
That was the same argument Nixon had about Vietnam. He couldn't quite get the JCOS to agree to nukes. I'm with you, nuke first ask questions later.
Lol, there's plenty of capacity that's not used short of nuclear weapons
name one thing
Literally any other type of bombing or missile strike?