especially since the GOP is so dead set on tax cuts despite the fact that they don't truly work and things like tax increases and investing in the economy do.
The function of tax-cuts
is to invest in the economy, by way of the public spending their own money as they please, instead of sucking it all up to deal with the state's needs. There's a lot more flow of capital in the civilian sector than the military-industrial complex (it
does exist, regardless of how much political clout it may or may not have), and it's much more widely spread out through the economy than basically any government project in history.
Taxes for stimulus are not about the government buying things, they're about the government enabling the public to buy things. Subsidies for common goods, wage offsets, workfare projects like the Hoover Dam,
not throwing money at the entirely-real-even-if-it's-not-a-big-political-power military industrial complex. Because a lot of that money vanishes up the asses of executives and such, it's too many layers up in the economy to be a solid return on investment for economic gains.
Of course, for tax cuts to work you have to actually cut taxes on people who
spend money on actual things, not the people who are just going to buy a third yacht or immediately throw it back in the stock market. Middle-class, not millionaires.
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As for the thread topic, my own idea would be reusing the Alaska's 13 inch guns with only minor modernizations, focusing work on rocket artillery shells for those guns. They cost far less in maintenance than railguns will any time soon, and rocket artillery at that size is very likely more cost effective for shore bombardment than missiles or railguns, with the obvious projectile guidance allowing for full accuracy at the edge of range as opposed to railguns simply being a very fast kinetic impactor.
This would be
monstrously expensive in the short run as you have a lot of industry to rebuild for those barrels, but you have minimal R&D costs in only upsizing modern artillery shells as opposed to making it contingent on getting railguns fully worked out, and once you've built them they'll tolerate budget cuts and accept quite sizable "plug and play" modernizations via shell improvement, whereas railguns are likely to need massive wiring changes if not power plant improvements to keep upgrading as the power draw increases alongside vastly more frequent full-barrel replacement.
Beyond that, I'd simultaneously go with
small railguns for the dual-purpose mount, specifically designed around
not being the maintenance hell monsters currently prioritized in R&D, actually focused on anti-air and anti-projectile duties, relying on the low per-shot cost of the 13 inch guns to be using them against
all surface combatants instead of needing to bother with the multi-million anti-ship missiles or low-endurance high-maintenance railguns.
And have it truly
armored against anything short of estimated modernizations of 10 inch guns, so that it
demands anti-shipping missiles it should be designed to near enough
ignore. To my understanding, anti-ship missiles are reliant on blowing holes below the waterline to sink ships with flooding, with minimal deep damage potential. Dealing with this is most directly done with having an armored citadel well behind the outer hull, too deep for the missiles to damage, with sufficient buoyancy to carry the rest of the hull flooding.
The ideal is to be impractically costly to deal with unless the opponent commits to railguns or re-developing big gun ships of their own, or start lobbing tactical nukes. The former is terrible for prolonged service with current technology, while the second is a
hideous up-front cost not many countries can soak because they either don't have nearly as strong a tax base or need a hell of a lot more layers of rebuilding. And the third should need no elaboration. For "Global Police" United States, getting the money back over twenty years of
not using missiles on everything is likely enough to pass Congress's sniff-test should the military ask.