Which poses a greater threat to your personal safety?

There’s no way to know – but personally, I’d like the military gone.

Most surely losing the military industrial complex. It would take trillions out of the economy cause the social safety net to fail anyway.

I’m not sure if the question is about the US or globally.

If it is about just the US, then I double-down on my answer, as it would cripple the US economy and leave us vulnerable to immediate attack from nuts like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Putin.

Removing the military would cripple entire cities at a time. Some towns would not exist without the money flow that comes with thousands of people being ordered to be at a location.

Not to mention – the number of workers suddenly flooding the job arena (because their soldiering job vanished) would cripple social security anyway.

All of that aside – the country loses a massive, organized, mobile force of people. Not everything that force does is awesome… but there is enough to solidify my opinion that it needs to exist. It is a necessary evil like lawyers.. and the irs.

Yes indeed. There’s more to the military industrial complex than plain old “defense”. What is conveniently neglected by its most vocal and devoted proponents is that it is unsustainable and wasteful beyond belief. Fortunately, the social safety net is there for these folks to make exactly the same claims against, and thus deflect attention.

It really depends on how we adapt to the aftermath.

Bear in mind that we’d be paying all the soldiers, sailors, marines, and government employees either way, whether through wages, salary, or unemployment. But we’d still save a fuckton of money as payroll is not the only thing our military dollars go towards.

And we aren’t exactly at great risk of invasion either; global warming pretty much keeps the Bering Strait from freezing solid enough to march troops over. Even if they did, I’m pretty sure Kim’s soldiers wouldn’t last too long in South Central (outgunned), and there’s plenty of NRA members that’d be happy to do a little “charity work” anyways.

Yes, there would be an initial shock as certain towns get their financial core ripped out… unless we somehow replace it with something else. Many towns only exist because of mining even today, and if we wanted to take some of the money we saved and put it towards repairing/upgrading our infrastructure to late-20th-century standards, we’d be retooling a lot of plants to make a different type of product and placing enough orders to give our manufacturing sector a shot of steroids; machinists don’t care if they’re making a wing spar for a fighter jet or a steering knuckle for a dump truck so long as they get paid.

That said, removing the social safety net would likely lose any immediate savings due to the increased need for police (possibly even National Guard) and would have other ripple effects as well. I know that if someone’s car got stolen and taken to a chop shop so that someone else could buy groceries, they’re probably going to miss a few days from work.. and I likely wouldn’t be the only one. And that assumes that I even feel safe leaving the house instead of staying home to protect my stuff from looters. Lost productivity plus increased Law Enforcement costs equals savings?

Honestly, there are too many variables to really say for sure.

Bombs for brown people?

@Pandora George Carlin sums it up.