US military spending is HUGE compared to other countries budgets. It is not that big compared to the US budget - in WW2 we spent about 45% of GDP on military stuff - if that was done today we'd have a budget of about ten trillion dollars.
Also much of what is classified as military spending could probably be moved to other categories - the VA, for example.
It's not really "both" in the case of the US; as with most developed nations, the US devotes a certain percentage of its national budget to military stuff. With the US, it appears gargantuan, but that's because the US economy is the largest in the world by GDP as measured in USD, so of course it's going to look like a lot. But there's a big difference between how much the US spends today on the military vs. in WWII during its wartime economy, or Nazi Germany during that same time.
It is not a question of spending money on military, it is a question of how much. Last I checked, the US military budget is around 700B, while healthcare, education etc account for a tenth of that amount. Another question is, how much of this eye popping amount is wasted?
US military spending is nearing a 70 year low as a percentage of GDP. It has fallen by about $150 billion since 2009. By 2019 it's projected to hit about 3% of GDP. By comparison, France and the UK are around 2%. Military spending right now is not the primary problem facing the US fiscally.
Entitlements are the priority when it comes to US spending. They take up 60%+ of the federal budget. When you throw in the State and Local budgets (which combined are nearly the size of the federal spending), military spending is a modest fraction of US spending habits.
The chart is very misleading as it doesn't take into account the size of economy. The US is a much larger country than it was in 1945 and is spending much smaller portion on military today.
During WW2, US defense spending was over 40% of GDP. Today it's less than 5%.
While military spending (not counting veterans' benefits) in 2015 was around 16% of the total US federal budget[1,2], it made up 53.71% of the discretionary spending budget, dwarfing the next closest category, "government", at 6.54%.
From the BusinessInsider link below:
"The military budget is by far the largest single cost displayed. It is almost six times larger than the 2015 education budget and it is more than 34 times the size of NASA's 2015 operating budget. In total, the costs of running the military amount to approximately 16% of the overall 2015 US budget."
The military budget isn't the entirety of military spending. It doesn't include the VA budget, the DOE budget (maintaining those nukes), the actual cost of wars themselves, etc.
Adding up all the parts, it's pretty close to a trillion a year - about 933 billion.
The US is budgeted to spend $637 billion on the military in 2015. If the same is true for 2016-2019, the US will have spent $2.5 trillion. If you include 2020, then it's more than $3 trillion.
He's quoting % GDP of USA, not % of budget. I think that is a discrepancy.
The spending is still massive in comparison to pretty much any country in the world. As I said in the other post, just a handul of worlds countries come close to spending 3% of GDP on military - now couple that with the fact that USA has largest GDP in the world and you get a staggering amount of money spent.
USA spends very little money on military as a percentage of GDP while being the most powerful force in history.
I would argue that that money is very well spent.
> The government expects to spend $6.011 trillion in 2022. More than 65% of that pays for mandated benefits such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
> Military spending includes the Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Veterans Affairs. All of these military costs combined equal $943.9 billion.
> Pensions are entitlements and we can't really touch those.
They are touched all the time. Implicitly via decreased purchasing power of currency that is not made up for via cost of living adjustments, and explicitly via things like increasing retirement age and changes to benefit formula.
Healthcare spending is also frequently adjusted via reduced remuneration and policies for remuneration to providers changing the quantity and quality of services received.
Also much of what is classified as military spending could probably be moved to other categories - the VA, for example.
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