The Glade 4.0

How do you figure? I'm not connecting the dots between weapons development and procurement in the 60s and 9/11, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Is your theory that a different approach would have hastened the end of the Cold War and/or avoided the need for us to get so heavily involved in the Middle East to counter the Soviets there?

RangerDave:

More people paid income taxes in lower tax brackets in the 50s and 60s than they do now, but those more people gave up less of their actual income to taxation because of payroll tax creep. You are aware that George W. Bush passed the largest tax increase in history right?

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I wasn't aware of a Bush increase, actually. By what mechanism did that happen?

Bush increased the both the ceiling and rate of taxation for FICA and Social Security on both employees and employers. The combined tax rate for both is nearly 16% of the first $185,000. For the Self-Employed, they pay all of it; for the salary earners employed by other people, they pay at least half of that 16%. Obama actually cut those tax rates.

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Huh. Can you point me to a link showing the before and after? I tried Googling, but my results keep getting swamped by articles about the current debate over whether to let the Bush-era income tax cuts expire. Speaking of which, do you know whether the packages that are set to expire include those increases in the payroll tax, or will those increases remain no matter what?

RangerDave:

Depends on what the Obama Administration does at this point. They reduced for the payroll taxes to about 6.2% of the first $108,000 for most employed people, but the self-employed are still getting hammered. And you won't find many links, but I'll search because payroll taxes slip under the radar. People tend to forget that total taxation, including payroll taxes, as a function of GDP remains near constant at 19.5%.

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That's an exceedingly long question to answer, so I'll give you the short version:

Kennedy's Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara was opposed to civil defense, ABM, and other systems that had been focused on making nuclear war winnable, or at least survivable. His feeling was that only a MAD situation made America safe as it guaranteed (supposedly) that nuclear war could never start.

In point of fact it does not as it assumes not only that both sides are rational but that they are rational in the same way, and ignores the possibility of an accident starting an attack (as nearly happened a few times) or a situation growing out of control before rationality can assert itself. When I've talked to strategic planners they have indicated that simulations show that such scenrios do, in fact, escalate very, very, rapidly. sometimes in a matter of less than an hour.

In any case, McNamara focused on what eventually became the "arms race", building ever more warheads and delivery systems while ignoring defenses other than conventional fighter aircraft. Not only that but he focused on the wrong delivery systems, resulting in the apparent dominance of ballistic missiles. His feeling was that defenses were not a worthwhile investment as the Soviets could just add more missiles and/or bombers to counter them.

In point of fact, just building more offensive systems also resulted in the Soviets building more to counter them (and the reverse as well, since we were building to counter them) and in either case, the Soviet well of money was not bottomless. It is possible that had we stayed out of Viet Nam and put some of the money into strategic defenses we could have hastened the economic collapse of the USSR rather than giving them the reprieve of the 70s.

The other aspect of this is our continued attempts to rely on arms control treaties to prevent nuclear war when in point of fact, nuclear weapons have spread. We continue to rely on ancient ICBMs and bombers with only a few more modern B-2s and the submarine leg of the triad being modernized; the B-1 has been removed from the strategic role entirely by ill-conceived arms control.

We should have retired the B-52 ages ago and should never have built the B-2 at all (or really the B-1B, the original B-1A would have better universal application) and should really be flying now some combination of the B-70 that was never purchased and/or other supersonic strategic bombers that succeeded it. In point of fact, SAM systems that were supposed to defeat the B-70 never came to fruition and probably never will simply because of the limitations of what you can make a reasonably-sized and priced missile do against a target at high altitude that is able to maneuver. ABM on the other hand is far more practical because ballistic targets don't maneuver, Russian claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

Had we pursued that we'd probably see ICBM/SLBM systems obsolete or close to it already, instead we'll probably wait another 30+ years for that. A bomber-based deterrent would have numerous advantages including but not limited to cross-applicability of bombers to conventional roles, the bomber's survivability, the fact that manned bombers can be called back and take longer to reach their targets increasing opportunities to de-escalate, the far greater economy of scale involved with bombers (you can just add a bomber to an airfield, an extra missile requires an additional silo or another submarine) and so forth.

Instead, we've played to Russian strengths ever since the ABM treaty. Russia is good with rockets; their rapid development of the R-36 only 5 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis speaks to that. They aren't so good with bombers. This is why GBI pisses them off so much. We've played to their strengths in numerous ways such as the aforementioned crippling of the B-1B which we traded to avoid them air-refueling Tu-22m Backfires which they never intended to do anyhow and have allowed them to keep building newer and better ICBMs and SSBNs which we have only fledgling defenses against while we keep trundling along with B-52s and Minuteman IIIs that should have been gone ages ago. Domestically, we can't politically build new ICBMs and from an economic and strategic perspective we shouldn't. We should be steadily replacing elderly bombers to maintain a modern, flyable fleet of a stable size, and the same with fighters, and we should be pursuing an extensive, layered ABM/SAM defense network (Much of the Army Reserves and National Guard could be devoted to this rather than endless units that are designed to sustain lengthy counterinsurgencies like Iraq, which we need to avoid in the future) while getting rid of ballistic launchers as technology permits, but we don't do that because we're still buying into the Kennedy/McNamara myth that the other side has a bottomless pit of money to build more offense if we build defenses.

In point of fact, bombers are going to replace ICBMs anyhow because we're at equilibrium more or less with the Russians and bombers are useful for conventional purposes. I'm hoping the B-1R program can go forward, as well as a B-52 replacement in the Mach 2+ class or possibly even in the B-70 performance class, and maybe a hypersonic bomber in 25 years or so, and an end to ICBMs and then SLBMs.

As to the Middle East, my feeling is that it would be much more manageable if we had simply made it clear that as long as they do buisness, we'll do buisness. I.E. we may sell arms to Israel but we won't butt in otherwise as long as they understand that's just buisness. If the Soviets invade, we'll come get rid of them so that buisness can go on, but we're not staying. But if we have to come over there because of what the Middle East is doing, it's on. We're going to make the place into a parking lot and then the Marines are going to come paint stripes on it. If we'd never backed ourself into the position of needing to fight proxy wars like Viet Nam because we'd decided to pin our hopes on MAD we'd be in a position of much more leverage with respect to countries like Iran

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."