• jarfil@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Spending doesn’t mean quality or even quantity.

    Americans get swindled big time by weapon manufacturers colluding with government contract drafters, and pharmaceutical companies colluding with medical insurance appraisers and hospitals to raise fictional treatment costs through the roof. All that, while having a taxation pressure pretty much on par with the average in the EU.

    So far, the EU has managed to avoid the medical racketeering, it isn’t unthinkable that it could also avoid the weapons racketeering… unless it keeps buying overpriced shit from the US big bully in town, instead of investing in it’s own manufacturing.

    An EU military, with weapons produced in the EU, would be a huge loss for the US, not necessarily much of a sacrifice for the EU.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The problem for the EU is they don’t exactly have a sovereign currency, at least not the way The US, UK, AU, CA, and China have. We can always pay more, because the government can just “print more money.” I don’t know if the EU can really do that with the Euro. They should be able to, but they don’t seem to function the way our Federal Government does.

      • jarfil@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The ECB is more independent, but that doesn’t really matter. The EU can borrow from it just like the US government does from the Federal Reserve, and the ECB’s mandate is to stabilize inflation, no matter what the EU does.

        If the EU decided to borrow massive amounts of Euros to spend on weapon manufacturing and creating its own military, that would have massive ripples on the whole economy and impact inflation, but the ECB would just have to follow.

        The only real difference is in foreign monetary policy: the ECB doesn’t have to listen to EU Parliament’s wishes to change monetary policy in order to weaponize it, while central banks in the US, UK, AU, China, etc. do have to listen to their respective government’s wishes to mess up the internal economy for whatever reason they see convenient.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Thanks for the explanation. I’m an American, so trying to keep our politics straight is a full time job. I haven’t had much opportunity to really look at the alternatives.