The "Powered Armor" Budget Subcommittee is a Choice Appointment

So when I was looking at that dialogue exchange from last Wednesday's post, I was thinking about how it's kind of pompous for Stark to be bragging about how custom-made his armor is, given the immense amount of money he put into designing it. Of course your stuff is top of the line, Tony, you're freaking rich.

But in Stark's defense, he does design his own suits, it's not like he paid someone else to do it. Unless that's going to be the next big disaster in his life. Tony Stark has been stealing other people's intellectual property for years for his armors, and using his financial clout to keep them from doing anything about it. Until that's actually established though, he's makes his own stuff.

And the Firepower armor was originally designed with military backing, so it's not like it was done with whatever pocket change Edwin Cord could find in the couch cushions. I don't know if that's still the case, given that Firepower was trying to break into Stark's HQ for upgrades. He might be on his own now.

But that got me thinking. In our world, the U.S. spends a frankly ludicrous amount on the military every year. Like 15% of all federal spending, and over 50% of the discretionary (appropriations determined) spending. And that's in our world. What's it's like in the Marvel Universe?

The U.S. there still seems to have a standard military like our own, judging by the number of tanks and jets the Hulk smashed over the years. But you also have the Hulkbusters, the various attempts at a Super-Soldier project, stuff like Firepower. I don't know if the Sentinels would fall under that, kind of hard to believe they wouldn't be getting at least some dollars from military spending. All that stuff would be astronomically expensive.

Or maybe it's not. I mean, Jonah Jameson funded the creation of the Scorpion, multiple Spider-Slayers, I think another villain called the Fly, and hired Luke Cage at least once. I would expect a newspaper publisher, especially in the '60s and '70s, to be fairly well off, but that's kind of nuts. As Spidey pointed out once, Jameson could have just given all that cash to the webslinger in exchange for him leaving town, and then Spidey could have been Milwaukee's problem. Or the founding member of the Great Lakes Avengers. Whichever.

So maybe things just aren't as expensive in the Marvel Universe. It's the unseen effect of all the super-scientists running around creating Pym Particles, unstable molecules, artificial intelligences, and new, almost indestructible alloys at the drop of a hat. The ideas keep popping up, so they get devalued. Or the heroic scientists give it away cheaply for the betterment of humanity or something, while the villains' stuff just get confiscated.