Zameul wrote:Nah, it was sustainable, but only at the price of social sacrifice ...
Well, my more economical way of stating is, "communism doesn't work." Same thing.
Drlee wrote:You mean like the fact that the economy is vastly stronger than it was under Bush?
Printing money isn't what makes the economy strong. Obama's annualized growth rate has been 2.24% out of the recession, which is the slowest post-WWII recovery.
Drlee wrote:Or that we have modernized our forces and right-sized our military to face the world threat?
With ~150 F-22s? Or are you talking about F-35s? Much of our gear dates to the Reagan era. The major gains we've seen militarily are in drone technology. If we get UCAVs to the Navy, I can eat my words. However, we're not there yet. Then we have to ask whether stealth really matters with UCAVs. With a UCAV, you don't lose a pilot if it gets shot down, and you aren't stuck with a 9G limit in turns. So battle flight geometry necessarily changes, and that may mean that in first generation UCAVs, stealth isn't really necessary provided we're fighting today's modern Russian, European or Asian (Chinese) jets and air defenses. We instead need to focus on new maneuvers in battle flight geometry.
However, a lot of that doesn't matter when you're in a religious and cultural war, rather than an economic one. American popular culture is pretty vapid, so I can see why an Islamist wouldn't be terribly impressed.
Drlee wrote:That we have virtually extracted ourselves from a tiresome backward region of the world and successfully completed a pivot to the East?
A tiresome backward region that is the fuel station of economic growth... Oil isn't irrelevant. Further, we haven't defeated the enemy by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, Obama is finally admitting this via his Secretary of Defense.
Ashton Carter: U.S. to Begin 'Direct Action on the Ground' in Iraq, SyriaDrlee wrote:We have begun the control of medical costs in the US, improved care and insured more people than ever?
Most of us are paying a lot more for health insurance, if that's what you mean by control. Forcing people to purchase insurance they don't want isn't really a measure of success.
GOP seizes on collapse of Obamacare co-opsThe recent demise of Kentucky Health Cooperative, a nonprofit startup seeded with federal loan dollars under the Affordable Care Act, is part of a bigger, national trend. More than a third of the 23 nonprofit health plans created under Obamacare with $2.4 billion in federal loan dollars have collapsed, and most experts predict more failures on the horizon. Late last week, South Carolina’s co-op became the ninth to fail, following similar crashes in Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska and New York.
Why ObamaCare Is Failing“ObamaCare will almost inevitably be reopened in 2017, whoever wins the election,” notes a Journal editorial. That’s because young and healthy people continue to steer clear of this wealth-transfer scheme. The result is that in 11 states in 2014, the average plan paid more in claims than it collected in premiums. “This month the Health and Human Services Department dramatically discounted its internal estimate of how many people will join the state insurance exchanges in 2016,” writes the editorial board, adding that “for every person who’s allowed to join and has, two people haven’t.”
And deductibles are skyrocketing along with rates. Nice try Drlee. The problem is that if the people who join are older or have pre-existing conditions, and the young avoid this like the plague, rates rise. We were promised we'd save $2400 per year with a family of four. Clearly that has not materialized.
Trump: Obamacare health care premiums 'going up 35, 45, 55 percent'Typhoon wrote:The extent of the Iraqi collapse in 1991 may have come as a surprise to certain members of the Soviet military leadership (it should not have considering Arab performance during the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Iraq-Iran war) but ultimately the Iraqi military of 1990 was not the Soviet military of 1990.
Well the Iran-Iraq War is interesting in footprints, because Iran had a lot of American military hardware and Iraq had a lot of Soviet and French military hardware. So the fact that it was fought to a stalemate probably gave the Soviets a lot of comfort that they would defeat American arms or at least hold their own in battle.
Typhoon wrote:In 1990's Iraq the US had certainly found a Vietnam era combatant, the Soviet military however had left the 1960's well behind them.
Remember, that in the 1980s, the Iraqis hit a US destroyer, the USS Stark with an Exocet missile fired from a French-made fighter. I would note that the ship did not sink, whereas in the Falklands campaign, the UK lost two ships to Exocet missiles.
Typhoon wrote:The performance of Patriot during the first Gulf war (and the second ... hell even today) is widely acknowledged as abysmal.
The Patriot missile system is anti-aircraft, not anti-missile. The fact that it could be successful against SCUDs was helpful, although had they been armed with chemical warheads, I would concede that point. However, that's again why Russian exports of air defense systems are material as well. A lot of this is technology driven. For example, a HARM missile could have been construed to take out a battery. However, now it can only be construed to follow it's name--anti-radiation. One defensive measure is to decouple missile batteries from the radars, and have a standby when you lose one radar battery, you just put up another one and your missile launchers are still operational. So now detecting radiation means you still have to identify missile launchers and take them out simultaneously or immediately after your HARM attack.
SilasWegg wrote:The USSR had sketchy infrastructure and non-existent banking, both of which are necessary for modern consumption.
Which is to say again, communism doesn't work. However, the communists weren't trying to build a consumer society.
SilasWegg wrote:Reagan was reckless when it came to international politics.
Reagan was substantially more timid in the use of military force than the Bush family. Keep in mind, George H.W. Bush invaded Panama to effect an arrest warrant on Manuel Noriega.
Ignatyev wrote:Massive economic inefficiency, incompetent old men divorced from reality in control, some of which actually believed their own kool aid(Gorbi in particular), and the population not giving a damn about the ideology and being more interested in consumer goods than in the marxism-leninism kool aid.
Sounds like the US today.
quetzcoatl wrote:Efficiency is absurdly overrated by capitalists.
It's an incredibly important aspect of finance. It's one of the reasons why we're choking now. We're forcing even more money into the absurdly inefficient medical system.
quetzlcoatl wrote:The group tasked with actually running the Soviet Union on a day to day basis had become politically agnostic, and no longer believed in what they were doing.
Again, that sounds a lot like the United States today. We literally have a Supreme Court, for example, who will overturn two thousand years of case law to give lesbians a pass on estate taxes, rather than decouple estate tax from marriage. We have a Supreme Court that claims that marriage serves a "transcendental" purpose other than procreation and a population that thinks marriage has something to do with love, whilst blithely ignorant that the word "love" doesn't appear in any family code within the United States. Most of this sort of thing comes out of the political left, and may eventually result in the collapse of the United States as the left doesn't take law too seriously anymore.
Ignatyev wrote:Wrong, Gorbi did preside over the collapse, but the rot was there already.Granted, with enough will power and the right climate a China style perestroika, with economic liberalization could have happened, but northing of the sort could be produced by the feckless nomenclature.
Well China became communist in name only (CINO) in part because US strategy involved flipping the power dynamic between Russia as the senior partner and China as the junior partner in communism.
Piccolo wrote:The Soviet economy suffered a growth slowdown after 1975 but still maintained positive, albeit sluggish, growth rates until 1990 when the planning system was dismantled. I do not agree that the USSR collapsed primarily because of unresolvable economic problems. Instead, the USSR collapsed because of the contradictions inherent in maintaining a socialist economic system alongside an extremely hierarchical political system where the bulk of the masses are totally depoliticized and all power is held in the hands of a party-state elite. You see this pattern in other Marxist-Leninist states where the party-state elite eliminates many of the socialist features of their system and materially benefits from a transition to capitalism (see the Chinese princelings, the children of party elites who have become wealthy from nepotism and cronyism in the post-socialist system).
Your initial point there is still omitting something big. The microprocessor revolution meant that the US was introducing efficiencies that weren't attainable before. Up until the Carter era, for example, the telcos owned the phone in your home and you had to do business with a monopoly. Breaking up the Bell system introduced a lot of new things that technology could support, but the regulatory system didn't allow. Call waiting, three-way calling, voice mail, fax machines, etc. were all effectively illegal until de-regulation. There were a lot of great things that system built, like UNIX. Linux is the operating system of the web, and is a direct outgrowth of the break up of the Bell system. The PC revolution was even before they got networked. Additionally, while landline phones were still regulated, America was exporting cell phone technology to the world (when we actually led that industry too). Since the landline system in the United States was relatively awesome compared to most of the rest of the world, cell phone technology actually lagged in the US compared to the rest of the world. The adoption of cellular technology effectively broke the bureaucratic monopolies of telcos in much of the world. The US was also pushing satellite phones, which were bleeding edge.
All of this was before the internet was made available and networked computing.
Piccolo wrote:The reason why the Soviet Union broke up was mainly due to the politics of the Republics, and especially the power of the Boris Yeltsin pro-capitalist faction in Russia that saw the other Republics as unfairly benefiting from Russian productivity while not giving their fair share back.
I'm assuming you mean the Warsaw Pact in many respects. The Central Asian Republics were a part of the Soviet Union, but that charge is as applicable to the stans as it was to the Warsaw Pact countries. That also probably explains a lot of why Putin--like the French loss of Algeria--feels that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the 20th Century.
Truth to Power wrote:Nope. Efficiency is how you make sure your production processes are not actually consuming more value than they produce. It is not at all easy to do this in the absence of a functioning market.
It's also how you expand your production possibilities curve.
Drlee wrote:I think that there is the mistaken impression out there that our beloved free enterprise system is funding the technical innovation from which the US has derived so much of its wealth. This is not entirely true. The federal government is directly funding 32% of all research in the US. Further. The majority of federal non-defense spending goes to basic and applied research and the majority of industry research money goes to development. STRIKING NUMBER: Less than 7% of private industry money went to basic research with over 80% going to development. And our vaunted pharma industry? 12% of total sales go to R & D. This is less than 1/2 what our semiconductor/manufacturing sector spends. (And remember how much of that is development?) After WWII the federal numbers were significantly higher by the way.
Gulp. I think I actually agree with something you've said. A big problem in the tax code is treating research and development as one and the same thing. Research is expensive and a crap shoot, and that's why it should be treated separately. Your pharmco example is one of the reasons why drug companies end up so cash rich, but aren't particularly innovative. Development + bureaucracy means they make it incredibly expensive to get drugs to market and thereby create a massive barrier to entry.
KlassWar wrote:Not really. They were aiming to be able to preempt counter-revolutionary aggression against any socialist country anywhere in the world, and they needed to have man-portable artillery and small arms to spare so that they could supply any revolutionary movement that had a prayer at winning anywhere. The Warsaw Pact was plenty troublesome as it is, and going for broke in order to add more countries of variable loyalty and competence to it was a dubious proposition at best.
Well their small arms were no doubt a major force in the world. The Izmash AK-47 is undoubtedly one of the greatest guns ever created. It did literally change the world. Soviet small arms had a big impact on post-Imperial Africa and Asia.
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