mege said:
To the statement in bold: why is that? It saved our bacon from the great depression.
Because an investment in war is not like an investment in something like infrastructure or similar development.
You make bombs, you blow people and buildings up, the bombs are gone and people die. The bomb doesn't have the longevity or even any parallel use that a new road, building, or other infrastructure project like a factory or some other related project does.
There are other reasons why this is a bad thing but they aren't purely economic.
As for manufacturing, this is not purely a low/semi-skilled area. Manufacturing and particularly innovation has a strong link with intellectual property. If you look at what is happening in China, they want this piece of the pie from the US. They say "We will manufacture your goods for you at cheap labor, but we want to have your intellectual property", and you are giving it to them. They are now becoming a powerhouse for research and innovation and now that rug is being pulled from under your feet.
In terms of having jobs, the best way for a country to do that is to allow anyone to be able to create their own job or business. In this model, anyone who has a good business succeeds and the one who does not fails. This is not the case in the US anymore. Certain people get favorable treatment, and others get shafted severely.
Also you need to look at how the whole system of credit is managed. It's very hard under the current system for people to build something from scratch and make it on their own. It's a lot easier for the big players to get bigger, and in contrast it becomes really hard for the people down the bottom.
The thing is that most of the jobs out there are not in General Electric or Microsoft, they are in your local restaurants, or clothes shops, or corner stores, and other kinds of small to medium businesses.
Due to the fact that credit is a really hard thing to get hold of, businesses will go out of business simply because they do not have the credit that they need. If you really want to build a nation that gets people jobs, you have to start by looking at the current credit system and make some significant changes to that.
Also with regard to your thinking about low paying and high paying tech jobs, this is the thinking that is destroying your middle class. The thinking was to send all the menial jobs to places where the labor is cheap and the skillset required is low enough so that pretty much anybody could do it. The simple idea was that you make it over there and then ship it back and bag the difference.
But this has a domino effect. The people that were employed are now unemployed. Your country becomes a service economy more so than a manufacturing economy. So you have to buy more and more stuff from elsewhere. Meanwhile places like China are getting the infrastructure from other companies for free, taking the IP, building their own domestic economy, and getting bigger and bigger. Your middle class gets wiped out, and the disparity between the rich and poor gets wider.
Add to the fact that as a result more people are forced to get into debt for whatever reason be it education, or just to get through the week for groceries and electricity bills, and you have a very serious problem.
If you still want to think that war is profitable, maybe you should look at your current debt and how much your military system spends on the wars you are fighting right now.
This was my second post in this thread. I don't think anybody was talking to me, at this point in time, except for you. And of course there will be a change in balance of power in the world. If China would be bigger than the US and EU combined, most nations in the world would, pragmatically, take a bigger interest and sometimes have little choice in following its judgements.