Frank Sonnek, frequent commenter on this blog, has found some interesting data and raises some interesting questions about our defense budget:
our military spending exceeds ALL global military spending if you don’t count china, which spends about 15% of what we spend.
some analyses relate military spending to GDP, but I am not sure what the relevance of doing that is, as opposed to absolute spending.
let’s say we cut our military spending to be maybe 1/2 of the next top military spenders combined…. would those nations not work to defend peace and commerce? are we unfairly subsidizing the peace rather than having other nations chip in their fair share of spending?
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/10/military_spending
and now look at this chart:
It would appear that the United States of America really is the policeman of the world and budgets accordingly. Is it that we are enabling other countries to spend so little on defending themselves that they can afford free health care and all of those other welfare state benefits? Does our status as leader of the free world mean that we have to have the capability of defending every other country, as well as our own? Couldn’t we expect our technological superiority in warfare, expensive as it is, to result at some point in savings?Granted that national defense is one of the few legitimate functions of the federal government and that it has to remain an important priority in this still-dangerous world, given our massive deficits, should our defense budget be scaled back?
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