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@[email protected]
95% Of defense budget is fraud, waste, abuse, grift, nepotism, rent-seeking, money laundering, sweetheart deals, glory hounding, and price gouging. Abolish the Departement of Defense and go back to the old War Department and we save a cool 3/4 trillion per year with $70 billion left over for defense. Draft every adult, then after training them, arm every American with a rifle and shotgun and we don't need to worry about an invading army or a giant military budge to defend against everyone the war hawks decide to anger with their adventures.
3/4 trillion is enough to build 7.5 million houses for Americans. Homelessness would be ended in the first quarter of the building spree. Every homeless person in the country would be able to have a free house given to them. That is 770 thousand homeless people made home owners. That leaves 6.5 million homes to be handed out to the poor based upon a qualification and lottery system. Then in the next year even middle-class renters can get free homes built for their enjoyment.
In two years the total construction amounts to 15 million houses built with zero bombs dropped to make people homeless in other countries.
So by slashing the Pentagon mass murder budget, not only could we end homelessness in America, we could stop causing homelessness in a half dozen other countries.
In four years the total is 30 million houses built.
In a decade the total is 75 million houses built.
In two decades we approach 100% home ownership in USA.
If the government had started in 2001, we would have 100% home ownership already.
A housing boom could be funded for 1 to 2 decades, making millions of jobs in construction, mining, manufacturing.
Done right, with laws taxing real estate gains by corporate land holders, this would also have the positive effect of destroying the real estate speculation market, and forcing those businesses to join in the construction boom. If the speculators jack up the prices of raw land, the taxes jack up to meet them, then get plowed right back into the new home budget.
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Largely agree in the broad strokes, but there's already more than enough people in the armed forces that we don't need to expand, particularly if we bring them home as primarily defensive. Like you say, the worst budget drain is just providing over-engineered and under-performing toys, anyway, so cut all of that and we're so much better off.
If you really want a draft, bring back something like the Corps of Engineers working on civil projects, we've got plenty of infrastructure (by which I mean trains, not roads, though I guess we can spare a little for that if we must) that needs doing, forest management, housing, etc.
Though on that as well, I can get off my socialist box long enough to recognize that there might be legitimate reasons someone needs two houses. There's practically no reason they need three or more, nor hundreds of acres of private parkland. Put low limits on real estate and landlording, cap the number of short-term rentals per population, and you've got a really good start on homelessness even before the Corps builds a single house.
RE: @[email protected]
CC: @[email protected]
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@[email protected]
Yup. The rent economy is keeping people down. I would progressively tax all rents, especially economic rents, and leave employee wages alone. Basically this would implement the opposite of what we have now.
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