No, that’s like dad straight up saying “I know you need new clothes for winter, but I don’t like you and I do like drinking, so I’m going to spend our money at the bar instead.”
Saying we don’t have the money to feed the poor is at least having some shame about it.
The people are what makes the continent.
If you stop defending the people, what are you defending?
Wealth. The wealth of companies and individuals that have no loyalty except to themselves.
Europe drops the welfare state for fucking what? To spend money in weapons from usa? The same weapons that usa can disable remotely while they treat to invade iceland?
Nice…
My favourite right-wing trope is that the US can’t have socialised healthcare because they spend so much on defending Europeans so that they can.
Also the same weapons the USA wastes on a completely useless war.
-
Europe doesn’t drop anything, it’s an opinion peace from the Financial Times.
-
No, not US weapons (or rather: not only). The EU-based military industry is currently booming with countries ordering tonnes of stuff from Germany, Poland, Sweden, and France. All locally designed and built gear.
-
So let’s kill what makes our countries worth to live in.
Fuck you, bootlicker!
I am worried about Russia and it’s behaviour, but I totally disagree with this narrative across Europe about spending more on defence.
We spend plenty as it is, we just need to reorganise things and integrate our armies and navies. So many resources can be freed up by removing pointless duplication and redundancy, without spending more money at the expense of other parts of our economies.
It won’t happen because nationalism is a disease that infects almost all European countries.
We just have to invest in European defense systems and stop buying shit from US. Funding the fascists is unacceptable
Exactly.
OK, if you’re worried about Russia, let’s build a few more nukes and drone factories, and call it a day. Unless you’re trying to project power (the US) or use weapons manufacture as a fill-in for failed industrial policy (the US and now Germany), that’s all you need.
Removed by mod
If you want to help Ukraine, feel free to go volunteer. There’s plenty of conscripts there happy to change places with you.
Using them as a proxy to bleed Russia is not helping anyone except the US and weapons manufacturers.
The Royal Navy currently has fewer than 20 vessels active, including coastal boats. This is not enough to secure fisheries, defend the home islands, interdict drugs before they arrive, and to keep open the global shipping lanes Britain relies on existentially. There is no redundancy. Until earlier this year, only one Type 45 destroyer was operable. It had to be removed from its duties and sent to defend Cyprus from air attack, but it took a week to get it ready to leave.
Since the 2010 Strategic Defence Review, British military capability has been gutted. A large investment is now needed to course correct. Many European powers fell into the same complacency trap at the same time.
Some countries, like Ireland, have never had adequate military capability. Ireland has no surface to air missiles - not even a radar tracking system - and no jet aircraft at all. Again, half of its 8 naval vessels are inactive. Russia has been camping out in or near Irish waters happily doing whatever they please. Considering the amount of European data going through Ireland, this is a concern and the Dail is considering whether they need a more comprehensive military.
Financial Times has been maskless for a long time.
It’s sort of there thing. FT is where the business people go to talk about business. The NYT is where they go to scream “Ah! Socialism! China! Migrant Caravans! AI Gap!” at the rubes.
It’s the highest priced subscription of any paper by far. That alone should tell you something.
I remember years ago reading an article complaining that Germans are too frugal and their frugality will negatively impact the economy because of lack of consumption. And I thought to myself: “Hang on. I thought they tell us to spend only on what we need?” And if we do spend as they have wanted, the elites will say this is why we can’t afford a house because we spent it all on avocado toasts.
This is the hypocrisy, gas lighting and double standards of capitalism. They tell us such and such is good, and when we do exactly what they tell us, and it has had negative consequences, they say it’s our fault. It reminds me of one of the episodes in the first season of Squid Game, in which the players were winning but the games master broke the rules to handicap the players.
Wish this wasn’t evergreen.
Defend the continent from who? The teetering regime that has spent the past 5 years drawing the poorest country on the continent to a stalemate?
And the same regime definetly has the power to rule territory in which it’s despised by the majority of the population. /s
Defend the continent from people whose countries are becoming unlivable, and from missing out on all the resources we might want to procure.
I’m afraid we’ve really entered into a new era of increasing aggression and warfare.
War is very expensive though. It makes sense to spend fraction of that on a deterrent and that’s one thing EU does really well is to hedge all investments for overall stability. This is more of the same.
Interestingly it’s always the welfare state that has to be sacrificed, that is too expensive etc. The foundation of our democracy IMO.
But at least the americans think about us and want to help us! /s
Well, kinda, yeah. The only reason that has been a stalemate is that Europe mustered a bunch of support for Ukraine, at great expense. They’ve needed to gather and regather the will to spend money on this throughout, if you’ve been paying attention you’ve seen it.
Now I totally object to someone saying they need to dismantle their social programs to dump all that money into warfare, but neither should we say there is no threat at all.
What exactly will happen if there are suddenly “separatists” in Narva?
There’s 2.200 soldiers in Tapa which I assume would be deployed immediately.
There’s a total of 27.000 soldiers deployed as part of the Enhanced Forward Presence NATO deference. So they need a little more than just “separatists”
Removed by mod
«Opinion» pieces are a way for news media to cover their asses.
I’m an American. Y’all Europeans don’t believe the horse shit they got most of my countrymen to accept.
Also, that Janan Ganesh guy looks like a putz.
No way to make more rich people richer than to sacrifice the underclasses benefits.
It’s so unjust that I don’t have everything!!
Just stop subsidizing the rich, problem solved.
Where is a good guillotine when you need one.
Or better, send the asshole and perhaps his family to a war somewhere, so he knows first hand what he is asking about.
There’s plenty of conscripts in the trenches in Ukraine who will swap spots with these NAFO chickenhawks in a second . . .
What about taxing wealth, while reducing mass taxes like the VAT to finally get people to spend again? Increasing peoples salaries would also help, and capping rent to what it costs to ensure upkeep and needed new construction - i think that would easly do the trick to fill the states coffers and get the economy out of this slump instead of filling the bank accounts of shameless, greedy people. Those will find other ways to enrich themselves, maybe through the defense industry.
And take money away from the hard working Epstein Class!?
We should have a 20% annual wealth tax on fortunes over a billion dollars. Staying a billionaire should be like trying to swim up a waterfall.
Under FDR in 1935, if you made more than $5 million, you paid a 79% tax rate.
Yeah but that’s income, the billionaires don’t do that any more (loopholes loopholes!)
Tax the compound wealth (too).
The other alternative is a 100% inheritance tax above a threshold, and make it impossible to transfer wealth to the next generation
I’m talking wealth, not income. If your total net worth is $1.2 billion, this year you owe the IRS $200 billion.
The idea is that we make being that rich an extremely temporary condition. It’s like trying to run up a downward moving escalator or run against a moving sidewalk.
In fact, I would tune the tax structure to harness some of the competitive impulses of the wealthy. People that rich view their net worth as a high score. They literally view it like a personal life score. It’s just a video game to them. When your net worth goes from $10 to 20 billion, your lifestyle changes very little. Past a certain point, it’s just about bragging rights.
So I would harness this impulse. I would tune the tax rates so that it actually would be possible for a handful of the absolutely most skilled business owners to maintain wealth slightly above a billion (or whatever inflation-adjusted level we set) for a limited period of time. Those owning the world’s most profitable companies will be able to stay a bit over the threshold for the years their company is at its peak.
If you did this, you could actually harness the competitive instincts of the rich. Remember, it’s all about getting a high score. But instead of competing for the largest fortune, they would compete for how long they’re able to stay on the treadmill. Instead of size, they compete for time. A year or two would be a feat. A decade above the threshold would be a once-in-a-generation achievement. You would know these people by name. They would be famous. Staying above the wealth cap for any prolonged period would make you as famous as Musk or Bezos today. The rich would still get to compete with each other for bragging rights. They still compete for a high score. We just change what the score measures.
I don’t want to eat the rich. I want to harness their greed. Imagine a donkey being lead by a carrot. Except the donkey is on a treadmill, and the treadmill is powering an electric generator. I want to turn every billionaire into that for the public treasury.
Because these locusts leave and take everything that is taxable with them.
And i doubt a one time moving Tax is a good deterrent.
The only Thing the state could do is seizing the means of Produktion before Hand, but we can barely Imagine a wealth Tax. State capitalism is was of the Charts for Most peoples Imagination.
They can’t take real estate with them, and there’s no reason why a foreign owner of real estate can’t be taxed more than a local owner. Dividends of stocks in local businesses can still be taxed, as can transfers of ownership of those stocks on the local stock exchange. They’re also dependent on the state they left for any governments bonds they own as well as for enforcing any loans local legal persons owe them.
They can sell all those things, of course, but that just means other people have to start paying more taxes.
So we have to make sure that most of the world implements these taxes. Tax havens should be ostracized. In this specific case, there’s no need for a communist revolution, just political will to change something, diplomacy and unwillingness to budge towards countries who don’t want to play fair.
So we have to make sure that most of the world implements these taxes
Arent we already trying?
Tax havens should be ostracized.
Why should they care? They have more Money now. Of course not as much as they could have, but more than they Had previously.
In this specific case, there’s no need for a communist revolution, just political will to change something, diplomacy and unwillingness to budge towards countries who don’t want to play fair.
The people everywhere already try the diplomatic way, but breaking political will with capitalist media is part of the counter Offensive of the Bourgeoisie against the reformist struggle.
The need to Organize is equally important in reformist battles as in revolutionary Battles. Furthermore, the dependancy of the plan on global scale action means organization of scale unheard of in human History.
