I like to tell the story of when my ship first pulled into Pearl Harbor. We were manning the rail in our dress whites as we passed by the Arizona Memorial and rendered honors. My shipmate, next to me in line, observing the rank upon rank of ships at the docks, nested six deep, muttered under his breath as we saluted on command, “They never learn, do they?”

Besides, just becaused you dismissed it earlier does not mean anyone else is under any obligation to do so now.

Aren’t we working on a Main Battle Tank, that will take us into the mid twenty first? Obsolescence?

It is a conundrum, the day we don’t have a strong conventional force asymmetric will go out of style and the hordes will come knocking.

Makes more sense now to leave it alone, doesn’t it? In the interests of security.

To put it another way, there is a drastic transfer of wealth from most sectors of the population towards the very top. The mechanism may be in dispute, but it cannot be denied. Much of the data you present is very compelling, and I do not dispute it in principle. Yet the very hint of wealth redistribution (which is occurring now on a truly cosmic scale), sends you into paroxysms of denial.

Unless you can propose a hypothesis that satifactorily accounts for
why this upward transfer of wealth is occurring, no other explanation of this phenomenon can be taken seriously; especially if it is perceived to be emerging from those who seem to be benefitting from it so handsomely.

You need your mid-ocean ridges, your extragalactic red shift, your microwave background, your Michelson-Morely experiment, or none of your hypotheses, no matter how reasonable, is going to be met by anything but eye-rolls.

Some Democrats are quietly admitting that Ryan’s ideas didn’t actually suck.

Just like the Iraqis should appreciate “Shock and Awe”, Agu Ghraib, white phosphorus, limited electricity, no sewers on their way to liberty, freedom and democracy.

The “fiscal” and “economic”, why that’s all good. Another reason why “humanitarian” is considered a dirty word by all right-thinking people.

Again, that’s not what I said. This isn’t about those with little giving up anything. It’s about not being able to give them any more. The money isn’t there, and there simply aren’t enough rich people left to cover the gigantic bills already coming due. Remember the trillions in future entitlement liabilities we discussed a while back?

There is almost no money flowing from the poor to the rich through the government (Social Security payments to the wealthy are the only thing I can think of off-hand). There are trillions flowing by that route the other way. Look at what percentage of the budget is social spending.

What’s in it for me? I want to live in a society that has a lot of surplus wealth. A society that can afford things like space travel, high tech, advanced medicine, a high standard of living, and all the other things I like. And you get your pension paid by that top half of the income bracket.

All the private space companies out there now were either founded by or funded by billionaires, most of them earning their money in the tech boom.