General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: We just can't afford to take care of all the poor people in the world. [View all]hfojvt
(37,573 posts)that I used to work for DOD. Made good money in 1986 and was promised even more money. One guy I talked to said I would likely be a GM-14 if I had stayed with it. GM-14s make $40.99 an hour.
I quit as a GS-9 ($20.11 an hour) in November 1986 and was promised a promotion for the next two years, up to GS-12 ($29.17 an hour).
Why did I quit? Because as a 25 year old hippie, I did NOT want to be part of the war machine.
Also, I felt like a 40 hour week was boring as hell and also sucking my life away.
So there I was in the 1990s working 70 hour weeks and I calculated how much money I lost by quitting. It was something like $300,000.
But hey, I did get an MA in economics in 1990 so I know something about how the economy works.
The money that members of the MIC get simply does NOT benefit just THEM. Because they spend it. They go out to eat, the buy TVs and DVDs, they buy cars, and dog food, and stereos and high speed internet, and so on and so forth. And then the people that they bought a car from also have some money to spend, and so on.
When you pay some people to do a job, whether that job is just to bang rocks together or whether it is making armaments, then that money stimulates the economy.
I made a great personal sacrifice to get out of the war machine, something that ultimately cost me a lot and slowed the war machine not one bit. In fact, compared to now, even the 1980s look like the 1960s.