[NHQ]

That 200 Million is chump change only to people who think like chumps. In reality it is total waste, unproductive taxation that doubles as a counter balance to inflation, so doubly wasteful.

Chump together all the 100s of millions in waste year over year; the change to your chumping is not good change, its inflation and general impoverishment. Every penny of that 200 is a note in the bank of inflation and degradation.

[JeremyNT]

I believe this is implied in the parent's post.

We fund the military industrial complex to such a ludicrous degree that $200m can just disappear on bullshit contracts to cronies that go nowhere, and politicians don't bat an eye.

Nobody with power cares about the debt. They just keep borrowing money and handing it to the defense industry. This is one of only a handful of issues on which there is bipartisan agreement.

[NHQ]

Yes, the real government is the one in agreement, and the "handful of issues" account for almost all of the spending. Their disagreements, in budget terms and in reality, are cheap and pretentious theatrics.

But I doubt the politicians "don't bat an eye" at 200M, for they know that money is going straight out of the economy and into private coffers.

The government budgeters are not naive to the economics of military spending. The cope about pennies on the tax dollar is naive about both economics and what the government is really doing.

This idea that government is incapable, dumb, and prone to mismanagement is a harmful rationalization, and simply not true. If anything, this thinking excuses the government to act that way, and then there is no way of knowing if they are purposefully mismanaging or doing so because incapable.

[nilamo]

Is all of that truely "waste", if it is being paid toward onshore companies? The money doesn't disappear, it gets redistributed to American companies.

[Loudergood]

Broken Window Fallacy.

We could be spending it on things with a much higher return.

[fennecbutt]

Executives and shareholders* not you and I.

[nchmy]

What in the Ayn Rand are you talking about?

Are you really unable to distinguish the difference in value between, say, funding infrastructure maintenance - or 1000 other things - and just filling some crony's pockets?

[tonyhart7]

US literally have 1 trillion military budget, if you think 200 mil its a waste for prototyping a next gen weapon then I would have a bad news for you

[hansvm]

It's something like $3 straight out of my pocket, and it's going to be a flop. That trillion dollar military budget has a lot of semi-unavoidable costs (pensions, salaries, etc), but it has a lot of bullshit like this too.

Your argument feels something like the heap paradox [0], "the budget is big, so this thing doesn't matter." The budget is made of things this size though, and all it takes to fix it is to start taking grains of sand out of the pile instead of stacking the pile higher.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

[potato3732842]

The nickels and dimes add the F up. Stop acting like they don't.

Save perhaps the most extreme "I spend 70% of my six figure income on rent because I want to live alone somewhere trendy" of household budgets this is true for literally everything from the smallest business in the smalles of small towns to the federal government.