Good question.
Good question.
This might seem like a minor quibble, but that money doesn’t really come from taxpayers, and understanding what seems like a very technical financial thing is really important if you want to understand geopolitics in general. Here’s an except from the beginning of David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 years, easily one of the single most interesting and enlightening books I’ve ever read:
Starting in the 1980s, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the re- payment of Third World debt, itself accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire Third World combined — mainly fueled by military spending. The U.S. foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries (Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States) that are in most cases, effectively, U.S. military protectorates, most covered in U.S. bases full of arms and equipment paid for with that very deficit spending. This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game (China is a special case, for reasons that will be explained later), but not very much — even China finds that the fact it holds so many U.S. treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to U.S. interests, rather than the other way around.
So what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the U.S. treasury? Are these loans? Or is it tribute? In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as “empires,” and empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples. The U.S. government, of course, insists that it is not an empire — but one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these pay- ments as “loans” and not as “tribute” is precisely to deny the reality of what’s going on.
arguably the entire worth of the dollar as a currency comes from it being what taxpayers pay in, so yeah it kind of does come from taxpayers
also, money is fungible with other money, so "this stream of money doesn't come from there" doesn't make sense
The fungibility isn’t what’s at issue. The link between the money stream and the military is a system that can’t be understood separately. Thinking of it as taxpayer funded doesn’t make sense.
arguably the entire worth of the dollar as a currency comes from it being what taxpayers pay in, so yeah it kind of does come from taxpayers
I encourage you to read the book. It really changed my perspective on what value even is and what it means. I don’t think you’ll think this after reading it.
Thinking of it as taxpayer funded doesn’t make sense.
if you raise a billion dollars from taxpayers, and then raise a billion dollars from foreign debt, and you have a problem that you need to spend a billion dollars to fix, any dollar from either pile can go towards fixing that problem
this is like when red bull broke their spending cap in F1 and their response was to say that the overspend was from catering
I encourage you to read the book.
i can't read