US Policy Choices

[America is] not the greatest country in the world, professor. ... [Addressing conservative] And with a straight face, you're going to tell students that America is so star-spangled awesome that we're the only ones in the world who have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia! Belgium! has freedom. So, 207 sovereign states in the world and 180 of them have freedom. And yeah, you, sorority girl. Just in case you ever wander into a voting booth one day, there's some things you should know and one of them is: there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we are the greatest country in the world. We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 179th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, 4th in exports. We lead the world in only 3 categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending - where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies. ...

I'd like to see campaign finance done completely through public funding. Get 10,000 signatures, and you get a piece of the pie, that you have to spend on your campaign, which will be heavily audited. Highest amount anyone can give to a campaign is $100, period, and I don't care if it means higher taxes, it'll get big business out of politics, everyone will have an opportunity for an equal say, and billionaires won't decide who gets the most air time/public exposure unless they themselves are running.

Holland: And does this help explain why we have a very low tax burden overall, relative to other wealthy countries, but a lot of Americans feel that they're being taxed to death?

Johnston: Well, one of the reasons some Americans feel they're being taxed to death is that if you add up our taxes, which are low compared to other modern countries, and then you add in private expenditures for things the tax system pays for in other countries - a lot of our health care costs, higher education costs, admissions and fees and tickets and licenses for a lot of things - lo and behold, we end up being a relatively high-tax country. But it depends on how you analyze the data.

And let me give you one killer figure: We spend so much money on our health care in this country - or as I prefer to think of it, sick care in this country - that for every dollar that the other 33 modern economies spend for universal coverage, we spend $2.64. And this is done using something called "purchasing parity dollars", so they're truly comparable. So we spend $2.64 per person and still have almost 50 million people with no coverage and 30 million with limited coverage, and these other countries spend far less with universal coverage.

Here's how much that costs: In the year 2010, if we had had the French health care system, which is one of the most expensive in the world, it would have provided universal coverage and it also would have saved us so much money that we could have eliminated the individual income tax that year and all else would have been equal. Our excess health care costs above those of the French were a little over 6 percent of the economy and the income tax in 2010 brought in about 6 percent of the economy.

Holland: And Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy and Research points out that if we paid the same for health care per person as all of the countries with longer life expectancies, we would be at a balanced budget today and looking at surpluses in the future.

Johnston: We can continue to have this enormous military operation - one that I have been very critical of - we can continue to have that if we just fix the health care problem. So imagine what happens if we get our health care costs in line by doing what every one of our economic competitors has figured out is the cheapest thing to do: universal health care with little or no out-of-pocket expense. And if we then cut back on this enormous military, where we spend 42 percent of all the military spending in the world, we would be able to lower taxes, run surpluses, fund higher education and research that will make us wealthier in the future. It's just two things we need to address - just two.

...

Johnston: ... Here's what the newest data show based on tax returns: The average income of the bottom 90 percent of us has fallen 20 percent below where it was in the year 2000 - it fell from about $36,000 to $30,000. It has fallen back to the level of 1966, when Mustangs were new, Lyndon Johnson was president and we were prosecuting a war in Vietnam. 1966.

And what happened to the 1 percent of the 1 percent? Well, their income was about $5 million dollars a year back then on average and now it's $23 million dollars a year on average.

Now it's important to add a point: This is how it's measured by the tax system. Very, very wealthy people - Warren Buffett, hedge fund managers, Mitt Romney when he ran a private equity fund - are not required to report most of their economic gains and legally they can literally live tax-free or nearly tax-free by borrowing against their assets. You can borrow these days, if you're very wealthy, against your assets for less than 2 percent interest and the lowest tax rate you could pay is 15 percent. So no wealthy person with any sense of good economics will pay taxes if they can borrow against their assets. Now you and I can't do that because our assets aren't worth that much, but if you're a billionaire and you borrow, let's say, $10 million dollars a year to live on, you pay $200,000 interest, but your fortune through investing grows by $50 million. At the end of the year you pay no taxes, your wealth is up almost $40 million dollars and your cost was just the interest of $200,000.

Holland: Amazing. How much have changes to the tax code had to do with the sky-high level of inequality we see today?

Johnston: Oh, I believe that the Reagan-inspired changes in the tax code are absolutely fundamental to this enormous growth of inequality. ...

... Around the world, "power projection" is, in fact, a central mission of American forces. [Congressional Democrat Adam] Smith expressed alarm at the prospect of its diminishment. He asked a question, which was purely rhetorical: "What if, all of a sudden, we don't have troops in Europe, we don't have troops in Asia, we are just, frankly, like pretty much every other country in the world?"

...

The United States, separated from much of the world by two oceans and bordered by allies, is, by dint of geography, among the best-protected countries on earth. Nevertheless, six decades after V-J Day nearly three hundred thousand American troops are stationed overseas, including fifty-five thousand in Germany, thirty-five thousand in Japan, and ten thousand in Italy. Much of the money that the federal government spends on "defense" involves neither securing the nation's borders nor protecting its citizens. Instead, the U.S. military enforces American foreign policy.

"We have hundreds of military bases all over the world," Melvin A. Goodman observes in "National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism" (City Lights). "Few other countries have any." Goodman, a former Army cryptographer and a longtime C.I.A. analyst who taught at the National War College for eighteen years, is one of a growing number of critics of U.S. military spending, policy, and culture who are veterans of earlier wars. Younger veterans are critical, too. A 2011 Pew survey of veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq found that half thought the war in Afghanistan wasn't worth fighting, and nearly sixty per cent thought the Iraq War wasn't.

... the United States already spends as much on its military as the next seven highest-spending countries combined. It has as many aircraft carriers (10) as the rest of the world combined (China has one). And Defense spending is up 22 percent over its Cold War peak in 1986.

What needs rebuilding?

The answer depends largely how prepared one thinks the country should be for the potential threats it faces.

Is the US ready to carry out the stability and counterterrorism operations that have defined American military deployments in recent years? Absolutely.

Is it ready to fight multiple traditional wars against major powers at the same time, as it was in the Cold War? That is less certain.

Current and recently retired members of the military - both brass and rank-and-file - bristle at Trump's criticism. Yes, the military is getting smaller, but the decision is strategic, they say, not a sign of weakness. And if wars are harder to win, it's a function of the changing nature of war, not the force.

...

Trump has worried aloud about a Navy that has gone from more than 500 ships in 1991 to 272 today - a figure he vows to increase to 350.

"Yes, and our cavalry's a lot smaller, too", quips Lt. Cmdr. Mark Jacobson, a Navy reservist who also served as a sergeant in the Army from 1993 to 2001.

His point is that the raw numbers don't say much about the Navy's ability to do its job. "The fact is, that one aircraft carrier today has the capacity of the entire Pacific fleet during World War II, with strike groups of over 60 or 70 planes."

What's more, the US has three times as many destroyers as both China and Russia, one third more nuclear-powered submarines than Russia, and eight times more than China, he notes.

... global stability depends on American global leadership, and American global leadership costs money. The United States is at the heart of a dense web of alliances. We extend formal security guarantees to more than 50 countries. Some see these alliances and guarantees as little more than a burden the U.S. can no longer afford. Yet what they actually do is dampen security competition. They reassure partner countries that they needn't build up their militaries to defend themselves against their neighbors, which then reassures their neighbors that they needn't build up their militaries. This virtuous cycle is one of the central reasons Western Europe and Japan recovered so quickly after the devastation of World War II, and why globalization has helped ease poverty around the world. For this virtuous cycle to be maintained, however, U.S. security guarantees must be considered credible. It must be clear that when the U.S. makes a security commitment to another country, that commitment will be met. This in turn means that the U.S. military must have the power and the reach to defend countries far from our borders.

• Article redefines "neocon". "Neocon" usually means "activist, interventionist US military, spreading democracy", not "strong US military to keep the peace".
  
  
• Neocons should be willing to pay for the wars up-front, in taxes, instead of putting them on the credit-card.
  
  
• Our huge military and strong public support for the alliance with Japan hasn't stopped the Chinese from growing their military at double-digit rates.
  
  
• Our allies provide their citizens with free education, health care and early retirement, while we pay for their defense.
  
  
• Neocons have also been adamant that America not raise taxes, and not run a deficit, so the only other option is to maintain the military at the COST OF social programs.
  
  
• Neocons have a history of taking "world security" to mean "give Israel anything it wants; support dictators in countries that have oil; etc".
  
  
• We have this notion that the appeal of our social and political institutions is proportional to our military power. We are always surprised when they are not "shocked and awed" by our plans of democracy and freedom and equality.
  
  
• Global Leadership does not equal Global Military Domination.
  
  
• We could cut military spending by 25% and still have an overwhelming force.
  
  
• "We were wrong about this war, but the NEXT war ... will be DYNAMITE! Trust me, you'll see!"
  
  
• Conservatives have zero tolerance for mistakes in, say, the Obamacare web site launch, but wave away massive military waste and mistaken and failed decade-long wars.
  
  
• Letting your country weaken by draining its treasure is, in my opinion, at least as dangerous if not more so than trimming back our military to one that is small enough that it cannot realistically engage in such misadventures with the taxpayers' money and their children's lives.
  
  

Full disclosure: as an officer in the military, I see a lot more of the organizational and budgetary side of things than most, so I wanted to share my two cents on military spending and let you decide on whether we actually spend too much.

As OP mentioned, there's a lot of metrics people use on US budgeting. Let me explore some of these issues in detail and hopefully bust a few myths, give you a historical background, and tell you what we currently peg spending on.

Military Spending - And Its Myths

Yes, the US spends $600 billion dollars on defense. And yes, that's more than the next 7-8 countries combined (assuming China's budget is honest, which we believe is not). And yes, the US spends about 36% of the worlds total spending on military.

But, as OP also mentioned, as a function of GDP, the US is at 3.3% - lower than some nations (like Russia) and a far cry from the 5.6% the US spent in 1988 near the tail end of the Cold War. Source: World Bank.

In the post WW2 world, this is at an all time low per the CFR with it having peaked at 16% around the time of the Korean War.

So which metric is better to use?

Well the issue with looking at nominal spending is that nominal spending doesn't correct for cost of living.

Take into consideration what the military actually spends its money on. You can use Table 5.1 of the GPO or this nifty Official DOD Budget Request 2017 (yes, all this stuff is public) to see the pretty breakdowns.

Per the GPO, for 2013:

• Personnel Wages - 25%
• Operations and Maintenance - 43%
• Procurement - 16%
• R&D - 10%
• Atomic Energy Defense Activities - 3%
• Other - 3%

So right off the bat, we need to kill the myth that buying new equipment costs us the most money. It simply doesn't.

Why did I bring up cost of living? Let's take a look at personnel wages and benefits shall we. Per the DOD budget request, this chart shows that:

• $130 billion was requested just for military personnel wages for the 2.1 million active + reserve
• A total of $177.9 billion was requested on just military personnel wages + benefits
• Another $72.9 billion was requested for civilian pay and benefits for the 760,000 civilian FTEs in the DOD
• A full $250.8 billion or 48% of the DOD base budget is allocated to JUST pay and benefits

What does this mean? Consider that a Chinese soldier is paid roughly a tenth of the wages of a US soldier. So sure, if we went to a Chinese pay scale, we could save $120 billion overnight. But that's neither feasible, wise, nor is it a good indicator of relative strength with China.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that both China and Russia have huge domestic arms industries producing goods at domestic prices. Furthermore, the world arms industry isn't an open market - the US doesn't compete with China or Russia directly as nations only buy from other nations they trust. The US buys domestic or buys from close allies like Belgium and Germany, who have comparable costs of production. End result? The US often pays 2-4x as much for a fighter jet than the Russian equivalent because US wages, US suppliers, and US maintainers all cost US prices, not Russian prices.

As a side note, this also irks me about the whole "arms trade" statistic and how the US is the number one exporter. Sure, by dollar amounts, we are - but our goods are magnitudes more expensive. The fact that Russia and China - producing goods at Russian and Chinese prices - are even close, should tell you who is exporting more physical quantity of goods, but I digress.

In sum, using nominal spending gives you eye-popping numbers, but it tells you little about relative strength between nations. If anything, it should tell you how little Europe actually spends on defense (especially in comparison to Russian strength), and that China is a lot closer to the US than most people realize.

Waste Exists - But It's a Complicated Issue

One of the top issues everyone talks about is waste. Let me first bust one budgetary myth though: use it or lose it is not a DOD-only thing. It exists in all federal agencies (e.g. NASA, NOAA, etc.) because the budget is done annually. Money not used one year isn't seen again.

It DOES NOT mean you need to spend it to get it again next year - the budget request is done annually and things change based on need and what not. Admittedly though, it does make it harder to justify getting budgeting if you don't show need, so alas, the system is very flawed. Short of a congressional change to how budgeting is done though, we're in a tough spot.

Does waste in the military exist? Absolutely. Thankfully, people are noticing and paying attention - there has been a considerable shift in mindset in the past few years towards saving money. Of course this has to be balanced: you don't want to skimp on maintenance or training, as lives are on the line when things go wrong.

In some areas, waste is also balanced by operational necessity. For instance, aircraft routinely dump fuel. In carrier aviation, we dump fuel because we have max landing limits - too heavy, and we can snap the arresting gear on the carrier or permanently damage our plane. Thus, if we arrive at the boat too heavy, the choice might be to dump thousands of pounds of fuel ... or jettison even more expensive bombs. To the layman, it seems like we're burning fuel for no reason - but there's a rhyme and reason for it no matter how much it sucks. (And for the environmentalists, jet fuel is kerosene-based - it's nothing like gasoline)

Inefficient Spending Often Comes from Political Sources

One of the big issues with the annual budgeting is that there is little long term continuity in a field that necessitates long-term planning. For instance, the new class of aircraft carrier has been in the works for over a decade - and was planned out two decades ago. And yet, funding for it has oscillated year by year.

I'll give you an example of how political grandstanding has royally f*cked military personnel and arguably cost us more money in the long run: sequestration.

During sequestration, a stop was put on training new replacement pilots for the fleet. Hundreds of replacement pilots were put on hold for a year. Well, since they just got their wings in training (costing roughly $1-2 million to train, each), you don't want to cut them from the military, but you still need to pay them.

But here's where the long term effects come in: every pilot in the Navy serves a 3-year operational tour before going back to become an instructor of some sort for 3 years. Whenever a pilot in the fleet is done with his first 3 years, a new replacement pilot comes in to take his place. Suddenly, the fleet had a shortage of pilots, and too many instructor pilots with no one to teach. And once pilots are done with their commitments, a lot get out to pursue other interests in the civilian world. Talk about a waste of human resources.

But this balloons further: a few years later, that shortage of pilots means fewer pilots available to be instructors. Fewer instructors mean fewer replacement pilots. Surely you can balance out how many pilots you bring in right? But ROTC and the Academy projects how many graduates they need from 4 years ago: suddenly, you have too many pilots-to-be and not enough instructors, and the fleet may need more pilots.

I could go into more detail, but the point is this: seemingly small disruptions have BIG ballooning effects on how the military operates.

Likewise, a lot of 'inefficiency' comes from conscious decisions to save money, believe it or not. Take for instance, the fact that much of US equipment is old. In the 90s, with the Cold War drawdown, we stopped a lot of acquisitions programs. Equipment in the military is designed to typically operate in 30 year lifecycles - the notable exceptions are things like capital ships (aircraft carriers).

However, in the 90s, a lot of early to mid Cold War stuff was up for retirement - and instead of replacing them, their lives were extended.

This does, however, have an unintended effect on Operations and Maintenance - the US now has very old equipment to maintain. Some of our equipment is from the 1950s. I'm not even exaggerating - we have over 370 KC-135's, last built in 1965(!). For a long time - particularly with the Cold War drawdown - we put off replacing old equipment, but suddenly with a resurgent China and Russia, we've stretched a lot of these airframes lives out while in the late 2000's we finally sought replacements in the form of the KC-46.

All across the board you can see this happen. The F-22 was to replace the F-15 in the 90s/2000s, but was cut short and now the F-15 has had increasing costs rise to keep an airframe from the 70s and 80s flying. The A-10 was last built in 1984 - it was due for retirement years ago, but Congressmen (such as McCain) have kept it alive long past their expiration date.

I hope this all gives a little insight into how a lot of spending issues do exist in the military, but the situation is far more complicated than a simple comparison of nominal spending with other nations, and how waste and inefficiency are complex issues within themselves - sometimes by design, sometimes by outside meddling.

...

Now, let me explain the historical precedence of US military spending and why our spending is a conscious decision, not one haphazardly done.

The Modern History of Defense Spending

Believe it or not, in the wake of World War II, the US had a major debate over isolationism. There was a major drawdown in the military, with a lot of equipment mothballed or scrapped.

Stalin's actions in Eastern Europe and in Berlin (such as the Berlin blockade) and China falling to the communists were all major areas of concern. The straw that broke the camel's back, however, was the Korean War: outright naked aggression by a communist state against another state in the post-WW2 world was just too much. The US used the newly-created UN (which the USSR at the time was boycotting) to form a coalition of nations to fight North Korea. In the post-WW2 world, the UN was being tested: would it be toothless like the League of Nations, or would nations actually stand up and prevent wars of conquest?

This led to a major revitalization of the US military which as you can see saw its post-WW2 spike in spending go up to 16% of GDP in the 1950s.

The necessity of a powerful military in the post-WW2 order was predicted by many. Notably, General Marshall, in his Biennial Reports as Chief of Staff of the Army, concluded before WW2 even ended that:

• Oceans were no longer enough to protect the US heartland
• Future defenses necessitated a strong forward deployed presence in the world
• Technological superiority would have to exist as post-conflict mobilization and innovation cost a lot of lives

A particularly poignant passage is when he mentions that, if not for British and Soviet lives holding the line, as well as major blunders by the enemy, the US would have suffered a lot lot more. And that, had the Axis won, interviews with Goring and other Nazi leadership showed that by 1947, the East Coast of the US would have been subject to attacks by long-range Nazi weapons.

Even Ike, in his famed 'military industrial complex' speech - which gets taken out of context - actually prefaced that line with his passage:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.

Does all of that sound familiar? Because it should: the US military establishment has been purposefully designed to meet the challenges that General Marshall, Eisenhower, and other top military and political leaders have realized.

We are interested in global and full-spectrum warfare. A vital part of our defense strategy, in the world of long range missiles, supersonic jets, and precision weapons, is to put our front line of defense across those oceans. Bases in Japan, Korea, and Europe, aren't just there because our allies have hostile forces close by, but also because the further away from the US the conflict is, the more layers of defense any foe has to get through to affect the US directly.

Full-spectrum isn't just a catch phrase either: the US is interested in every aspect of warfare from human intelligence to special warfare to ground warfare to air superiority to space superiority. Whereas in the Cold War, NATO allies often focused on specializing in specific areas due to their small size and lack of funding (e.g. the UK was particularly focused on anti-submarine warfare), the US was designed to be not only the bulk of conventional forces but also charged with handling all areas that other nations lacked: logistics (e.g. the US currently has over 230 strategic airlift transports and over 430 aerial refueling tankers - the rest of NATO has about 10 strategic airlift transports and 40 tankers), submarines, bombers, etc.

Even our current aircraft carrier fleet is set to 11 ships by design. Why 11?

• Each aircraft carrier is nuclear powered. With a 50-year lifespan, each carrier goes into drydock at the 25 year mark for its reactor's refueling
• The refueling process is complex and lengthy, and takes 2-3 years to complete at which time the ship goes through major repairs and overhauls to stay relevant the next 25 years
• At the end of said overhaul, another 1-2 years are put on the ship for testing and what not
• With each carrier produced at a staggered 4-5 year interval, at any given time, one of our 11 carriers is out of service
• One carrier is permanently forward deployed to Japan
• Carriers are operated in 18 month cycles broken into 6 month periods. There is a six month deployment followed by six months mostly at home giving crew rest and doing minor repairs and maintenance, and six months in training for the next deployment.
• Nine stateside carriers = 3 rotations of 3 ships rotating inside those 18 month cycles
• Not coincidentally, we have a Pacific Ocean to care about, an Atlantic Ocean to care about, and an Indian Ocean that Congress mandates we care about. The President can truly ask "where are my carriers" any day of the year at any time.

As I said, this is by design.

But why you ask? Why is all of this necessary? Good question. Let me explain:

Your Answer to Spending is Answered in the National Security Strategy

Since Eisenhower, the US has pegged spending against the National Security Strategy of each successive presidential administration. During the Cold War, the general US strategy was: "win two major wars at any time" - largely believed to mean the USSR in Europe and China in Asia.

An archive of NSS's since Reagan is available here.

When the Cold War ended, President Clinton changed the strategy to "win hold win" - win one war, hold the line in another, then win that war when the first one concludes. The NSS also was no longer focused specifically on Russia and China. Correspondingly, the US military shrank from 3 million active + reserve to 2.1 million active + reserve. The US carrier fleet went from no fewer than 15 at any time during the Cold War to a necking down to 11 by the mid 2000's. The US anti-submarine patrol force, for instance, was cut in half overnight in the mid 90s.

In the 2000's, Bush changed it to "1-4-2-1" - protect the homeland first, deter aggression in four regions of the world simultaneously, be able to sustain combat operations in two of them, and win one of those decisively.

When Obama took office, he made a major change. First was the 'Pivot to the Pacific' - largely meant to counter China. As a result, the US refocused its efforts on buying conventional high-tech weaponry to face a resurgent and growing Chinese foe, after two decades of neglect or diverted attention under Clinton and Bush (weapons made to fight guys in pickup trucks don't do so well against actual conventional foes).

And in 2015, the NSS was amended again: this time with a refocusing on Russia after their actions in Crimea and the Ukraine. Again, instead of arresting defense spending, the President actually asked for more money that year ($630 billion) than the GOP Congress gave ($610 billion) or what the DOD requested ($580 billion).

(On that note, if you weren't sure, I should tell you that budgeting is made by the DOD, amended by the President, and then sent to Congress for voting in).

Lord knows what President Trump wants to do with our National Security Strategy.

As I wrote, since WW2, there has been a conscious decision to shape our military size and capabilities. We concluded after WW2 that we could not sit back and wait to build up modern equipment after aggression has happened, that we need to keep the frontlines overseas, and that we are the only Western nation demographically and economically capable of facing China and Russia.

And that's ultimately what it all comes down to: our spending can be either too much or too little based on what we as a country want to do with our strategy.

From the mid-1800s to the late 1920s the world experienced a similar era of globalization. ... Great Britain, which was then the dominant global power, was a huge investor in emerging markets, and fat cats in England, Europe and America were often buffeted by financial crises, triggered by something that happened in Argentine railroad bonds, Latvian government bonds or German government bonds. There were no currency controls, so no sooner was the transatlantic cable connected in 1866 than banking and financial crises in New York were quickly being transmitted to London or Paris. ... In those days, people also migrated more than we remember, and, other than in wartime, countries did not require passports for travel before 1914. All those immigrants who flooded America's shores came without visas. When you put all of these factors together, along with the inventions of the steamship, telegraph, railroad and eventually telephone, it is safe to say that this first era of globalization before World War I shrank the world from a size "large" to a size "medium".

This first era of globalization and global finance capitalism was broken apart by the successive hammer blows of World War I, the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression, which combined to fracture the world both physically and ideologically. The formally divided world that emerged after World War II was then frozen in place by the Cold War. The Cold War was also an international system. It lasted roughly from 1945 to 1989, when, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was replaced by another system: the new era of globalization that we are now in. Call it "Globalization Round II". It turns out that the roughly seventy-five-year period from the start of World War I to the end of the Cold War was just a long time-out between one era of globalization and another.

While there are a lot of similarities in kind between the previous era of globalization and the one we are now in, what is new today is the degree and intensity with which the world is being tied together into a single globalized marketplace and village. What is also new is the sheer number of people and countries able to partake of today's globalized economy and information networks, and to be affected by them. ... Daily foreign exchange trading in 1900 was measured in the millions of dollars. By April 1998 it was up to $1.5 trillion a day, and still rising. ... This new era of globalization, compared to the one before World War I, is turbocharged.

... the previous era of globalization was built around falling transportation costs. ... today's era of globalization is built around falling telecommunications costs ...

[Other differences: new era is making world much tighter, letting individuals reach out, based on an open international system pushed by USA after WW II.]

... If the first era of globalization shrank the world from a size "large" to a size "medium", this era of globalization is shrinking the world from a size "medium" to a size "small".

...

Globalization is the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before - in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is enabling the world to reach into individuals, corporations and nation-states farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before. ...

The driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism ...

...

[The Berlin Wall was physical, but there were many other types of "walls": Cold War blocs, national boundaries, trade barriers, different currencies, currency and capital controls, different economic systems.] What blew away all these walls were three fundamental changes - changes in how we communicate, how we invest and how we learn about the world.

... [Changes in communication and learning include cell-phones, computers, Internet, cable, satellite dishes.] ... several innovations involving computerization, telecommunications, miniaturization, compression technology and digitization. ...

[Changes in finance include development of commercial bond market in 1960's, securitization of mortgages starting in 1970's, elimination of fixed currency exchange-rates in 1970's, junk bonds in 1980's, securitization of international debt (which broke an "old boys" network), creation of 401(k) accounts, online brokerages, etc.]

...

[When the walls were blown away] they also blew away all the major ideological alternatives to free-market capitalism. People can talk about alternatives to the free market and global integration, they can demand alternatives, they can insist on a "Third Way", but for now none is apparent. ...

... the centrally planned, nondemocratic alternatives offered in the past - communism, socialism and fascism - helped to abort the first era of globalization as they were tested out on the world stage from 1917 to 1989.

There is only one thing to say about those alternatives: They didn't work. So ... those people who are unhappy with the Darwinian brutality of free-market capitalism don't have any ready ideological alternative now. When it comes to the question of which system today is the most efficient at generating rising standards of living, the historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism. Other systems may be able to distribute and divide income more efficiently and equitably, but none can generate income to distribute as efficiently as free-market capitalism. ...

...

... there are many reasons for the widening income gap [between haves and have-nots within industrialized countries]. These include massive demographic shifts from rural to urban areas, rapid technological changes that increasingly reward knowledge workers over the less skilled, the decline of unions, rising immigration into developed countries which drives down certain wages, and the shift in manufacturing from high- to low-wage countries, which also holds down salaries.

... the factor that may be the most important, and certainly has been the most visible in my own travels. This is the phenomenon of "winner take all" - which refers to the fact that the winners in any field today can really cash in because they can sell into this massive global marketplace, while those who are just a little less talented, or not skilled at all, are limited to selling in just their local market and therefore tend to make a lot, lot less. ...

...

... the widening income gaps that are helping to feed a backlash against globalization around the world. These widening income gaps are particularly noticeable outside the United States where middle classes tend to be much smaller and where antimonopoly and other income-equalizing laws are less stringent. ... free markets and free trade produce far greater incomes for a society as a whole. That is a fact. But that income is highly unequally distributed and the whole let-her-rip capitalism that comes with it is enormously socially disruptive. But to stick with a closed, regulated, bureaucratically run economy in today's world will impoverish a society as a whole, and can be even more socially disruptive - without generating any of the resources to ameliorate conditions for those left behind. ...

...

... ideological backlashers against globalization have more attitude than workable programs, more ideas about how to distribute income than about how to generate it.

...

... opponents of globalization resent it because they feel ... they have been forced into a one-size-fits-all [system]. ... some feel economically pinched by it. Some worry that they don't have the knowledge, skills or resources [to ever really benefit from it. Some resent the widening income gaps or] the way it squeezes jobs from higher-wage countries to lower-wage ones. Some don't like it because it opens them to all sorts of global cultural forces and influences ... Some don't like it because it seems to put a higher priority on laws to promote free trade than it does on laws to protect [the environment]. Some don't like it because they feel they have no say in its design. And some don't like it because they feel that getting their countries up to [global standards] is just too hard.

...

... The power of the backlash is hard to predict, because while all the various groups can agree that globalization is hurtful to them, they have no shared agenda, ideology or strategy for making it less so for all. ... [some will simply lash out] without offering a sustainable economic alternative. Their only message will be: STOP.

...

What is going on in the world today, in the very broadest sense, is that through the process of globalization everyone is being forced toward [the American system]. ...

But not everyone likes [the American system] and what it stands for, and you can understand why. Embedded in the Japanese, Western European and communist [systems] are social contracts very different from the American one, as well as very different attitudes about how markets should operate and be controlled. The Europeans and the Japanese believe in the state exercising power over the people and over markets, while Americans tend to believe more in empowering the people and letting markets be as free as possible to sort out who wins and who loses.

Because the Japanese, Western Europeans and communists are uncomfortable with totally unfettered markets and the unequal benefits and punishments they distribute, their [systems] are designed to cushion such inequalities and to equalize rewards. Their [systems] also pay more attention to the distinctive traditions and value preferences of their communities. The Western Europeans do this by employing fewer people, but paying them higher wages and collecting higher taxes to generously support the unemployed and to underwrite a goody bag of other welfare-state handouts. The Japanese do it by paying people a little less but guaranteeing them lifetime employment, and then protecting those lifetime jobs and benefits by restricting foreign competitors from entering the Japanese market. The American [system], by contrast, is much more efficient: the customer is king, [commerce] has no social function; its only purpose is to provide the most [product] at the cheapest price. ...

...

[Said to a foreign leader who says globalization is an American conspiracy to hold down the Arab world:] But the truth is, we aren't thinking about you at all! Not for a second. ... we're trapped under the same pressures as you are, and we're trying to keep one step ahead of the competition just like you are, and we're worried about what the bond market is going to do next, just like you are. ...

...

... I started to get mad about the budget debate that was then going on in the U. S. Congress. ... we have something tremendously special in America. But if we want to preserve it, we have to pay for it, we have to nurture it. But when I listened at that time to the infamous 1994 class of freshmen Republicans, I heard mean-spirited voices, voices uninterested in any compromise, voices for whom the American government was some kind of evil enemy. I heard men and women who insisted that the market alone should rule, and who thought it was enough to be right about the economic imperatives of free trade and globalization, and the rest would take care of itself. I heard lawmakers who seemed to believe America had no special responsibility for maintaining global institutions, such as the UN, the World Bank and the IMF, which are critical for stabilizing an international system from which America benefits more than any other country.

And as I thought about all this on the tarmac of Kigali Airport (Rwanda), I said to myself, "Well, my freshmen Republican friends, come to Africa - it's a freshmen Republican's paradise." Yes sir, nobody in Liberia pays taxes. There's no gun control in Angola. There's no welfare as we know it in Burundi and no big government to interfere in the market in Rwanda. But a lot of their people sure wish there were.

...

... For a lot of reasons, it is very easy to distort and demonize globalization ... [Why ?] Because people who are the biggest losers from globalization - workers who have lost their jobs to robots or foreign sweatshops - know exactly who they are. ... People who are beneficiaries of globalization, of more open trade and of foreign investment, often don't have a clue who they are. They often don't make the connection between globalization and their rising standards of living, and therefore are difficult to mobilize. ...

Another reason globalization is easy to distort is that people don't understand that it is largely a technology-driven phenomenon, not a trade-driven one. [Many jobs are taken away by automation, not by foreigners. They would be taken away even if we didn't have free trade.] ...

...

[We need a politics of sustainable globalization.] But a pure market vision is not enough. It is too brutal and therefore politically unsustainable. The Left, meanwhile, or what's left of the Left, has tried to hold on to the paternalism of the welfare state as much as possible. That is not economically sustainable.

What is needed instead is of either of these extremes is a new social compact that both embraces free markets bust also ensures that they benefit, and are tolerable for, as many people as possible. ...

> How would things in the United States change if
> large companies such as Apple and Nike didn't
> outsource production, and manufactured everything
> in the US?

Person A: Maybe we would revolutionize robotic manufacturing.

Person B: Precisely what would happen. People would invest a lot in their company and in the long run spend very little. It's what most food companies did a while back. Outsourcing food manufacturing is hard so they simply automate it all with machines.

Person C: I'm a roboticist, trust me when I say that this is the direction manufacturing is going. Though I fear it isn't going to be a good thing necessarily. Sure it will mean you can produce all your products in America, it will mean some serious innovation on the robotics front, but ultimately it will not lead to more jobs for America or China for that matter. For companies, although they may not know/understand it yet, the future is to have a factory without workers, that work 24 hours a day, workers that don't get sick, that don't need health insurance, that don't take sick days, experience is transferable and thus units are instantly replaceable. Now you can outlaw this, but some other country is going to implement it, and you are screwed as a company if you don't use them.

Person D: It will free human life from the drudgery of assembly line work. Surely we can find something even better to do with the extra man-hours.

...

Jason Pargin (AKA David Wong of Cracked) recently argued that the stereotype of Milennials as lazy good-for-nothings is a product of a very weird trend in society: we don't need all the human capital we have, but we still need consumers to buy things - things made with a "human" touch - to maintain our economy. The result is essentially a Rube-Goldberg machine of private welfare. There are still baristas at Starbucks and checkers at grocery stores, but why? We've developed cappuccino machines and self-checkouts that work fantastically. If Starbucks switched to automated coffee makers instead of baristas, there would be a hundred thousand unemployed baristas in the US without the funds to buy Nikes and Macbooks, and Starbucks would seem to customers like an overpriced commodity that can be produced at home. (Which it is. Baristas don't have any skills you don't have. Just some syrups.) It's the same line of thinking that made Betty Crocker take eggs out of their powdered cake mix to make people feel like they made something when actually they just threw some eggs, powder, and water in a pan and baked it. The finished product could easily be reproduced without humans. Checkers are the human face of the grocery chain - the chain gets to say it brings jobs to the teenagers in the community. It gives the teenagers the ability to be low-level consumers - they buy soda, iPods, hot pockets, makeup, movie tickets, et cetera.

A better example: the US Army has literally asked Congress to stop making tanks for the Army. In the California desert there are several warehouses full of brand new tanks that will never see combat because they are designed for fighting off foreign invaders in the event of a Cold War catastrophe - a fear that has long-since ceased to be realistic. But if Congress stopped ordering tanks, 11,000 factory workers in Ohio would be out of a job. Do you want to be the a*****e that voted to put 11,000 hard-working Americans out of a job just because they weren't NEEDED any more?

If you think about it, those 11,000 people are on a type of welfare - their productivity and labor aren't necessary, but we're paying them anyway. In fact, they're actually wasting costly materials. The American taxpayers are paying a salary to produce an excess. Why not just put the workers on a salary and have them grow corn instead of tanks? At least then we'd have fuel, and there wouldn't be a desert full of unused tanks in the middle of nowhere.

...

== Direct Answer ==

The U.S. would be very different if Apple could* manufacture there. The city where Apple produced its products would be highly industrialized and would be a key producer of electronic components; perhaps the biggest in the world. The city would have a huge population, a matching transportation system, and a unique higher education system capable of producing a staggering number of engineers and managers at a rapid pace. (In other words, it would be like Guangzhou or Shenzhen). (* Apple can't manufacture in the U.S. because so many of the parts and personnel would have to be imported from Asia.)

On the other hand, Nike could move all of its manufacturing to the U.S. right now and nothing major about the country would change. Nike just isn't really that important.

== Background ==

The fact is, America just doesn't have the manpower and infrastructure necessary to support the level of manufacturing required by some companies. There are two important considerations to be made regarding where to manufacture products: how automated the process is, and the length of the supply chain.

The best place to manufacture items with processes that are not highly automated (think clothing) is anywhere with a cheap labor force. That's why clothes are made in India, Vietnam, etc. The machinery and the labor force to run them are cheap, since there's so much that needs to be done by hand, cutting labor costs is the highest priority.

The best places to manufacture items with highly automated processes (chemicals, food, software) are places where there is a large specialized labor force. A company making food is going to need a lot of chemists, engineers, machinists and managers, but probably only a handful of unskilled people. In this model, labor costs aren't a major consideration because most of the employees design the tools and processes that are then used to create the end product.

However, we have not talked about the most significant aspect of manufacturing: the supply chain. A company can have the fastest, most efficient manufacturing process in the world, but that doesn't matter if you can't get the materials necessary for production. For the most part, physical goods manufactures use a technique developed by the Japanese called Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing. JIT strives to reduce costs by only making a part when it is requested (reducing inventory) and only keeping on-hand the amount of supplies that you'll need to produce only enough goods for that hour/day/week. The goal is to minimize the amount of things sitting around; inventory costs you money.

Different industries require different supply chains. Proctor & Gamble is going to have a lot of agricultural goods and chemicals coming into its facilities, but Ford is going to have thousands of car parts being delivered to its factories. If you were going to start a new car manufacturing plant from scratch, the best place to build it would be somewhere with an existing automotive supply chain because it will be cheaper to get parts and there will be experienced people in the area to help run it.

The United States is the largest producer of automobiles in the world. The reason why even non-U.S. companies like Toyota, Subaru, BMW, Hyundai, and Mercedes Benz manufacture cars in the U.S. is because GM, Ford and Chrysler invested the money necessary to build a supply chain capable of producing automobiles. There are hundreds of thousands of parts that go into producing a car (and some of those parts consists of thousands of parts themselves) and all of these parts need to arrive at the plant on the very day (maybe even the hour) that the part will be installed on the car. This approach is not feasible if you're shipping parts over from Germany.

The further a part has to travel to the next step in the manufacturing process, the more expensive the process becomes! That's important; read it again.

With a company like Apple or Dell, there are thousands of parts required to build their electronic devices. Most of the parts are specialized electronic components that can only come from Japan, China or Taiwan. So it makes sense to manufacture electronic in one of these places.

Edit: I remember reading an article with Tim Cook (the person responsible for putting into place Apple's manufacturing process and successor to Steve Jobs) talk about the Apple supply chain: he claims that many of the parts for the iPhone are produced within blocks of one another in order to reduce costs. That's how ridiculously dedicated Apple is to their manufacturing process.

...

Person E: Not all goods have a cost structure that is dominated by labor costs. For the iPhone, assembly is 2-5% of the cost.

Person F: It's the supply chains. Need items from 50 different factories? No sweat, built within 50 km of Shenzen. In the US? Made in 17 different states. Sure, the labor costs aren't huge, but the inconvenience, the new risks, the logistics costs etc pile up tremendously.

Person G: If the production came back to the US wouldn't the supply chains become shorter as there'd be more demand for the internal components?

Person H: Clearly you haven't been to Shenzen. The infrastructure is staggering. It's a difference of kind.

...

Assembly and manufacture aren't necessarily the same thing. [For many "we now build it here in USA again" products] I imagine many of the components were still made elsewhere and shipped to the US for final assembly.

...

We would all be poorer; isolationism is a bad fiscal policy.

[Apple moved manufacturing to Asia.]

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn't driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia "came down to two things," said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia "can scale up and down faster" and "Asian supply chains have surpassed what's in the U.S." The result is that "we can't compete at this point," the executive said.

...

"The entire supply chain is in China now," said another former high-ranking Apple executive. "You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That's the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours."

...

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple's executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company's analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

I can't imagine there has ever been a more gratifying time or place to be alive than America in the 1950's. No country had ever known such prosperity. When the war ended the United States had $26 billion worth of factories that hadn't existed before the war, $140 billion in savings and war bonds just waiting to be spent, no bomb damage and practically no competition. All that American companies had to do was stop making tanks and battleships and start making Buicks and Frigidaires - and boy did they. By 1951, when I came sliding down the chute, almost 90 percent of American families had refrigerators, and nearly three quarters had washing machines, telephones, vacuum cleaners and gas or electric stoves - things that most of the rest of the world could still only fantasize about. Americans owned 80 per cent of the world's electrical goods, controlled two-thirds of the world's productive capacity, produced over 40 per cent of its electricity, 60 per cent of its oil and 66 per cent of its steel. The 5 per cent of people on Earth who were Americans had more wealth than the other 95 per cent combined.

... the truth is that while a small fraction of American manufacturing jobs migrated overseas over the past few decades, a far greater fraction of manufacturing jobs simply disappeared and are not coming back. The far bigger driver of these job losses is the creative destruction that comes from technological innovation and productivity increases. ...

...

At the same time that U.S. manufacturing jobs have disappeared, U.S. manufacturing output has increased. Manufacturing has simply become so productive that it is no longer the jobs engine that it was in the 20th century.

There are three major divisions of work:

Primary (food production, raw resource extraction)

Secondary (processing and manufacturing)

Tertiary (services and transport)

The primary sector went from 99% of people's jobs to being less than 1% now because of mechanization. A man on a tractor can feed hundreds. That was ok because people could move from farming to the secondary sector to process this new wealth of resources.

The secondary sector then became almost completely done in by advances in industrialization. One plant conveyor belt with ten workers can produce more tools in an hour than a craft shop could make in a month. That was ok because when these manufacturing jobs dried up we moved up to the tertiary focused economy: serving all these goods and delivering expertise to others.

Now, automation will take away the last of the secondary sector, and many of these service and transport jobs. Machine intelligence will take away the jobs that require expertise but not a lot of creativity (already developed techniques like surgery, routine taxes, filing claims against parking tickets, etc).

There's no real "fourth level" to go into. The only fourth level is research, development, and novel engineering. Obviously most people aren't suited for these jobs, even if we let everyone have free education to the PhD level most would not pass.

... in practice the debate about the death penalty is not about whether it's ok to kill murderers. It's about whether it's ok to kill innocent people, because at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.

There is no one in the criminal justice system who believes that system works well. There is no one in housing law who believes this is what law was meant to be. ... The law of real people doesn't work, even if the law of corporations does. ... The law has convinced most Americans that the law is for the rich, except that part of the law that involves the prisons. We, all of us, have a duty to fix this. To repair this. To make it better.

• "There was a study of parole boards, and it discovered that when they looked at the likelihood that the parole board would grant a petition or parole, the most important factor seemed to be what time of day his case was heard."
  
  
• "... we could say well, you know what, we're never going to get rid of all biases. And so a next-best solution is simply ensuring that our juries and our judicial benches are diverse. The worst possible thing is when everyone is biased and everyone is biased in the same way. If you look at the makeup of our judiciary, it is primarily white, wealthy, Ivy League-educated older men. That's a problem because all of their biases are going to tend to a line. And that's going to be exacerbated by the fact that our legal system and all of our laws under our common law system have been developed by older, white, highly-educated men. I think to the extent that we can focus on term limits efforts to ensure a diverse set of judges, that's another way to get at this problem of bias."
  
  
• [Police interrogations:] "... the development of something called the cognitive interview. And the focus of the cognitive interview is collecting information. It's not about pressuring someone into admitting guilt. It's about extracting as much information, as much data from the person you're talking with as possible. Now, what that does is, it avoids any of the problems that we know happen when we use psychological coercion. We don't really run a risk of a false confession. ..."
  
  
• "I am asking that we rely much less on hunches, but it's not just cops that I care about. I want judges and jurors and eyewitnesses to all give up this notion that they're infallible, that their memories work the way they think their memories work, that they make good calls based on objective factors. I think we need to control for our human limitations."
  
  
• "And one of the things that I think is a very important step for us with respect to eyewitnesses is treating memory more like we treat other types of trace evidence. If you think about a bloodstained handkerchief - how careful we are to preserve that evidence, how careful we are to track sort of how it's handled over time and who has it at any given moment, we don't take any of those similar precautions with memory.
  
  And yet what we know from the psychological evidence is memory is very, very fragile and very malleable, just like blood evidence is. So very simple things could be enacted today which would make a big difference. One of the things is simply ensuring that the person administering the identification procedure doesn't know who the suspect is."
  
  
• "And one of the ideas that I suggest in the book is the possibility of virtual trials in which a lot of the things that we know lead to wrongful convictions and incorrect outcomes could actually be controlled.
  
  So it shouldn't matter how attractive the witness is. It shouldn't matter whether the attorney is wearing a particular tie or gesturing in a certain way. The bombastic exchanges which occur in many trials - those shouldn't determine the outcome at all. That makes for good television but terrible justice. Now, if we controlled the situation of the courtroom, if we used, say, avatars and used a time delay, we could remove a lot of these biasing factors and ensure that jurors were focused on what we purport is the most important thing to the outcomes of trial.
  
  DAVIES: Avatars meaning that - would be an avatar for every witness, an avatar for the attorneys, an avatar for the judge so that the words would come out in some sort of neutral way that the juror could evaluate."
  
  

... since Roe v. Wade, most Republicans have talked a lot about abortion while doing little to make meaningful change in that area of policy. Furthermore, they've opposed or even stalled measures that could prevent abortions by targeting the underlying causes, like poverty, education, lack of access to healthcare, and supports for single parent and low-income families. In fact, I suspect these reasons contribute to why abortion rates rose under Reagan, rose under the first Bush, dropped under Clinton, held steady under the second Bush, and have been dropping under Obama. As such, I'm not sure we can hold that voting Republican is the best thing for abortion rates in this country.

It's no coincidence that abortions go up when Republicans are in charge and down when Democrats are. The two biggest indicators a woman will have an abortion are that she is poor (75% of women who have abortions make less than $23,000 and half make less than $11,000), and had an unintended pregnancy (half of U.S. pregnancies are unintended, and 43% end in abortion).

Want to guess which political party is more effective at reducing poverty and unwanted pregnancies? I'll give you a hint. It's not the "pro-life" Party that in this last Congressional session alone fought to cut medical care for poor mothers and children, food programs for kids, and contraception coverage and access for women.

A letter my brother wrote four years ago to our parents, who are single-issue voters on abortion policy. It's a little out of date, but its essence is still holds.

My parents asked us to all vote for McCain last election, and my brother wrote this in response. It really opened my eyes as to how complex even a single issue can be.

Dad,

I take seriously your desire to end or reduce abortions, as they are my own desires as well. I take voting and participating in government seriously, as I have dedicated my work, my talents in my own way, directly and indirectly, inside and outside government to bettering the public institutions that represent us.

I voted for Sen. Barack Obama, and I proudly stood in line on my birthday for almost an hour and a half to do so. For many reasons I voted for Obama, and it would take too long to tell you all the reasons why, but I will talk a little about the abortion issue because it is a big issue on which you requested a vote for Sen. John McCain.

1) Although I believe abortion is wrong, a vote for Republican John McCain because he is pro-life is a wasted vote for the pro-life movement, in my opinion. Since the Roe v. Wade decision in the early '70s, we've had Republican presidents Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. Abortion is still legal at the national level.

A win for McCain might lead to a pro-life Supreme Court judge appointment, but the judge would face confirmation by a Democratic Senate. A Democratic Senate would not confirm a pro-life judge, maybe a moderate conservative.

But even if all of the following things happen:

- a conservative judge makes it through Senate confirmation

- a case challenging Roe v Wade comes up

- the new judge helps overturn Roe v. Wade

abortion would still be legal in most of the Unites States. The legality of abortion would just become a decision for the individual states. Currently a ban on abortion would occur in only about half a dozen states should Roe v. Wade be overturned. Abortion would continue to be legal in about 30 some states, and I'm not sure about the status of the remaining states. I could be wrong on some of these figures, but what I am saying is that overturning Roe v. Wade would do little to curb abortion, in my opinion and many others.

I believe in looking at the broader, more practical approach to reducing abortions, such as decreasing poverty and stabilizing the economy for the middle class. There is also a strong correlation of lower incomes and lower government assistance to higher abortion rates. Republicans like McCain believe in Reagan's trickle-down economics - pump up the rich, and from the top town, the rest will benefit. But I see the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer under Republican policies and ideals.

For example, the long-term effect of McCain's health policy ideas would not allow me to afford going to the doctor for check-ups and preventive care because his $5,000 health benefit credit for a family moves us toward private catastrophic coverage only, much like auto insurance. (Auto insurance doesn't pay for maintenance. I believe affordable health insurance should pay for "maintenance.") Although I believe in moving away from employer-based health benefits, as McCain advocates, his way leaves a lot of people behind.

If we can't afford our own health care, how are we supposed to afford kids? And if people, in general, can't afford kids, they might be more likely to have abortions, should they be in the difficult situation.

"... in a recent survey of women who obtained abortions, nearly three-fourths cited economic hardship as a reason for obtaining an abortion. Three-fourths also cite barriers related to work, school or child care responsibilities. Given this data, it is important to understand how to address these economic and social hardships in order to help women bring their pregnancies to term. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has long advocated for a comprehensive strategy to reduce abortions."

"Recent research finds that the abortion rate among women living below the poverty level is more than four times that of women above 300% of the poverty level. This study of all U.S. states from 1982-2000 finds that social and economic supports such as benefits for pregnant women and mothers and economic assistance to low-income families have contributed significantly to reducing the number of abortions in the United States over the past twenty years."

- Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, Reducing Abortion in America: The Effect of Economic and Social Supports, August 2008
[That study has been retracted.]

Republican policies generally shrink social and economic support for low-income families, while Democrats are generally in favor of helping the low-income and fighting against social and economic injustices, values I find consistent in the Catholic Church.

So not only would a vote for McCain do little to change the laws on abortion, but also his tax and health care policies, among other policies, would actually stress the middle and lower class and increase abortions the way I see it.

I would also be turning away from a moral obligation to make a change where a change can be made.

You probably disagree with me. My brothers and sisters might, too. But this is what I believe, and this is how I voted on the moral point of abortion. I feel I needed to address this issue because your request is important to me. I do not mean this as any disrespect toward you or your request. I hope you can be proud that I do believe I voted my faith.

Love,

Your son

Re: the "pro-life" GOP:

They aren't pro-life, they're pro-forced-birth.

"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.

Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

American Christians could all but eliminate abortion without just making it illegal.

Getting rid of abortion by making it illegal won't really get rid of it in the first place. For the poor it will go back underground and the well-to-do will just hop over to Canada. The very-well-to-do will fly to France and take the opportunity to shop in Paris afterwards. God will not be fooled by your law. God will not say, "Have you considered my servant America, that there is none like them on the earth, a blameless and upright nation, who fears God and turns away from evil?"

So what to do? Well, vow that no one born in your nation need fear going hungry and being raised in poverty with sh*tty lead poisoned water and sh*tty education.

• Eliminate most abortions of convenience by encouraging the teaching of safe and responsible sex in the schools, on the airways, in Church, and anywhere you can get the message out. Insist on good abstinence realistic sex education even at the cost of more taxes for yourself. Just admit to yourselves that no matter how much you push the godliness of abstinence young people are going to have sex. Even if you think such sex is a sin, you know it is going to happen just like it did for you, and you know Jesus forgives.
  
  
• Eliminate most abortions of poverty by eliminating poverty. If indeed children are a gift from God, how can you let them grow up hungry with lead in their water and crappy schools to go to just because they are not your own? Insist that your government raise taxes on yourselves, me, and the filthy rich to sufficiently to take proper care of all who are born. Take it upon yourselves to raise a few extra kids on your own if you have the means. Take poor families under your wing and see that their children do well even if they have a different religion than you.
  
  
• Reduce medical emergency abortions and spontaneous abortions by insisting that your government supply single-payer top-of-the-line healthcare to everyone -- even if it costs you more money, which it probably won't. (Data from the OECD show that the U.S. spent 17.1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care in 2013. This was almost 50 percent more than the next-highest spender (France, 11.6% of GDP) and almost double what was spent in the U.K. (8.8%). U.S. spending per person was equivalent to $9,086 (not adjusted for inflation).)
  
  
• Eliminate abortions of shame. Insist that your churches and fellow members stop shaming women who get pregnant in questionable ways. Instead celebrate all pregnancies however they came about. Make the mother feel that this really is a child God wants. Hell, make yourselves feel this is a child God really wants. If children are a gift from God, act like it!! On the other hand if some children - depending on the morals and status of their mothers - are not the gift of God then stop bitching about abortion.

Thing is, I *want* to live in a nation where there is no abortion.

I want to live in a nation where every life actually IS sacred. Where every person, be it a 6-week-old fetus or a geriatric case, DOES matter. Where ALL of us are important to each other.

But that's the thing, isn't it? Right there.

Yes, that's the thing.

See, if we *really* believed life was sacred -- be that some quality endowed by either god and/or man, depending on your beliefs -- then it would be our moral duty as citizens of that religion and/or that nation to ensure it has every opportunity for the best life possible.

Before it is even conceived, we would want to optimize the conditions for its growth. I mean, wouldn't we? If life is SACRED?

That means a healthy environment to include clean air, safe water, nutritious and balanced diet, shelter. More we would expect that environment to LAST for the duration of the life in question, to improve even, for future generations. What good is it to value life, if there's no world for it to LIVE in? If the warm seas rise, if the air is foul and the water toxic, if the oceans are choked with plastic, and the soil ruined? If the world is at war and the cities are aflame?

No, if we truly value LIFE, if we truly believe it to be SACRED, then before it even begins we as a people and as a nation must bend every effort to ensure not only its survival, but that it thrives to reach its full potential.

IF life is truly sacred, that is.

We have to be that nation, of safety and stability and opportunity, now and into the future. The parents must have opportunity to provide the best possible start, if life is indeed sacred, then surely we can agree to that bare minimum?

Yes?

For that life to have the best start possible, the parents need comprehensive and responsive healthcare, a decent standard of living and economic opportunity, good jobs and with a living wage, education, community, support, and so on.

But it's more than that.

If life is born to parents who are not full and equal members of society for whatever reason, race, color, sex, orientation, identity, beliefs, who are de facto denied the same rights and opportunities as other more privileged members of that nation, then we fail right out of the gate.

If we truly -- truly -- believe in the sacredness of life, then we must every single day work to build a civilization where ALL people are valued, where ALL members have access and opportunity without regard to their differences.

We must work to truly BE that shining city on the hill for ALL, not just a privileged few. Not just those who can afford it.

And when that life comes, when that baby is born, what then?

If that life IS truly sacred as you say it must be, what then?

No, don't look away.

Don't wave your hand and dismiss the question.

What then?

If you truly believe that new life to be sacred -- sacred -- do we not then have an obligation both as a nation and as a people to provide for that life? To provide the best possible environment, the possible best future, no matter the expense?

If we can afford trillion-dollar stealth fighters to END life, why can't we spend at least that much to save it?

You tell me life is sacred, but then you tell me to provide the best possible future for it costs too much. You tell me profits NOW matter more than peace, equality, justice, healthcare, education, and a better environment for that life in the future.

You tell me all life is sacred, but you don't really mean that. You don't mean ALL life, or even all HUMAN life. Those shouting loudest about the sacredness of life are the very same people who daily divide humanity up into the valued and the worthless and leave the latter to die.

If you TRULY believe human life to be sacred, then it's not enough to demand every conception be carried to term and every baby be born.

No.

If you truly value human life, then you must build a world where that life is truly valued, encouraged and celebrated for itself.

If you truly believe no pregnancy should be terminated, no matter what, no matter the circumstances of conception, no matter birth defect, no matter risk to the mother, then you must work every single day to reduce the likelihood of such conditions.

You must build a society where women are not impregnated against THEIR will, be it by force or deception or failure of technology.

Thus, we must first hold men accountable. No exceptions. No excuses. If life is sacred, then those who create it must be responsible for it.

If you allow no exemptions for rape, then you are morally obligated to work diligently and aggressively to ensure rape does not happen. You must change society, you must change how we think, you must change the entrenched power structure, you must change how we see each other. No exceptions. No excuses.

If you allow no exemptions for intention, then you must ensure to the greatest possible extent the right of women NOT to get pregnant, even by accident, even by force. That means full and unlimited access to birth control for every woman, for every girl, by THEIR choice and their choice alone. No exceptions. No excuses. Not for employers, not for insurance companies, not for the government, and most especially not for religion.

If you allow no exemptions for technology, then you must work to reduce the likelihood of failure. Birth control must be safe, RELIABLE, affordable, convenient, ubiquitous, continuously improved AS A PRIORITY, and the woman's decision. No exceptions. No excuses. Not even for God.

If you allow no exemptions for defect, then you must put every possible effort into preventing that defect, curing that disease, repairing that damage. MORE effort into that research than you do into ENDING life, than you do into weapons and war. No exceptions. No excuses.

MOST IMPORTANTLY, if society holds a woman personally accountable for pregnancy -- and that's what these new laws do -- then PREGNANCY MUST BE *SOLELY* THE CHOICE OF THE WOMAN AND THAT CHOICE MUST BE RESPECTED AND PROTECTED BY LAW. No exceptions. No excuses.

It doesn't end there. That society, the one which values ALL human life as sacred? That nation must have a RADICALLY different Foreign Policy than we do today, one that promotes this better future for ALL humanity.

And one that takes personal and moral responsibility for it.

No exceptions. No excuses.

But that civilization, the one which truly values human life, which welcomes life in the delivery room AND at the border, we're not really talking about that, are we?

Because this has never been about the sanctity of life or any right to it.

It's about power.

I do want to live in a nation where life IS considered sacred. Where EVERY life matters. Where all of us are important to each other. Where every life can reach its potential.

Where there is no abortion, not because it is illegal.

But because it is unnecessary.

But we do not live in that society.

If you want to talk about building THAT world, I'll listen.

But until then, until we live in a world where we actually DO hold life sacred and actually act as if it is, then abortion MUST be safe, legal, and available.

No exceptions, no excuses.