Chinese Billionaire Jack Ma has some advice for the US government: If the US is so concerned about industry and jobs, it should try starting fewer wars and spending trillions of dollars on them. Ma spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, saying:
“In the past 30 years, America has had 13 wars at a cost of US$14.2 trillion.” So what if the US “had spent part of that money on building up their infrastructure, helping white-collar and blue-collar workers? You’re supposed to spend money on your own people. It’s not that other countries steal American jobs. It is your strategy – that you did not distribute the money in a proper way.”
Ma is taking a fairly typical left-center line here, and he seems to think — mistakenly — that government spending can produce economic growth.
Nevertheless, Ma has a point.
There are bad ways to spend government money, and there are worse ways to spend it. In recent decades, the US has been largely committed to spending trillions on those worse ways. In terms of foreign policy, the US has spent trillions on overthrowing secularist governments in Iraq and Libya to clear the way for al-Qaeda aligned terrorists. The US has been trying to do the same in Syria.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon doesn’t know what happened to more than six trillion dollars spent in recent years. And, the Pentagon’s own report admits the Pentagon wasted $125 billion (more than one-sixth of an entire year’s budget) in “administrative waste.” And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As the Fiscal Times notes, “The Pentagon has never completed an audit of how they actually spend the trillions of dollars on wars, equipment, personnel, housing, healthcare and procurements.”
Read the rest at the Mises Institute.
