The socialist wing of the left often points to European countries as a model of successful social services. They point to things like healthcare and say “we’re the richest country in the world, why can’t we provide healthcare to everyone!?” They often miss a MASSIVE point that I think is about to slam back in their face.
One of the biggest things that former President Trump pushed for during his administration getting the rest of the world to contribute to global security. It isn’t a secret that America is essentially the global police. Whenever anything bad happens around the world, the world looks to us to try and solve the problem. This has led to massive proportional gaps between the US, who invests HEAVILY in maintaining relative global peace, and the majority of the developed world who expects us to just keep doing that.
We’ve found recently that many European countries (the same countries that the socialists like to point to as success models) can’t defend themselves. We’ve known this for a long time BUT it’s now insanely evident with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For example, we found that Germany, the largest economy in Europe, basically doesn’t have a military. Again, they primarily depend on us to keep the peace.
To the social programs: It’s also no secret the massive percentage of our national budget that goes towards military and defense. If you look at the pie charts of other countries’ spending on defense, our piece of the pie is MUCH bigger.
(I tried to find comparable pie charts but there were too many variables between ours and Germany’s)
The bottom line is this. Germany (we’ll keep using them as an example) in light of the Russian/Ukrainian conflict, has vowed to increase their military budget by 250%. WHICH is going to cut massively into their spending percentages. The question is because money is not unlimited, how will these changes to their budget, brought on by the requirement to protect themselves, affect their social programs that “work so well” according to the socialists?
In other words, European social programs work okay BECAUSE they don’t have to spend money protecting themselves. How are those same programs going to work now that they have to fund a military?
