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2-a. The Unites States spend 3.3% of it's GDP on the military. This is in line with other countries. Japan and EU are spending less only because they are under

by DenisM 10y ago

2-a. The Unites States spend 3.3% of it's GDP on the military. This is in line with other countries. Japan and EU are spending less only because they are under NATO (US) defense umbrella. France, for example, is at 2.1%, so 3.3% is hardly disproportionate. 2-b. Military spending (along with other public spending) is the cornerstone of Keynesian economy. It's the best way known to man to stave off deflationary spiral. 2-c. Military spending is the driver of innovation. Pretty much all of US technological dominance is rooted in military spending. Nearly all of our jobs here on HN came form that. 2-d. Projection of power brings tangible benefits to the US economy. So 3.3% is a real bargain, all things considered. [EDIT] Many comments ignored the benefits part of my argument. Yes, 3.3% is larger than 2%, it was not lost on me. Now consider that in exchange for the 1.3% the US managed to snag the first place in the high-tech industry with a huge lead over the rest of the world. Until just recently almost everyone who is anyone in the high-tech world was based in the US. Boeing, Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Google, Yahoo, Uber, AirBnB, the list goes on and on. It's not an accident. That 1.3% comes back many times over. And it's just one of the benefits. Look, I dislike people-killing as much as the next guy. But you can't ignore the economic realities, especially if you want to change the status quo.

FireBeyond 10y ago
2a - Relativity. France is at 2.1%, US 3.3%. In other words the US is spending fifty seven per cent more than France. How is that "hardly disproportionate"? What's that quote? "The US spends more on defense than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom we list as allies".
toomuchtodo 10y ago
I disagree that our military spending is reasonable, or a bargain. http://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison http://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison http://i.imgur.com/PhHo3eh.gif http://i.imgur.com/PhHo3eh.gif "The United states spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined."
- Viper007Bond 10y ago
  That's in absolute dollars though. A percentage of GDP is a much more fair comparison.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    It's not though; it's still a poor way to spend taxpayer dollars with entitlement liabilities accumulating, that are unfunded, while we continue to poor money into military waste, regardless of the percentage of GDP. EDIT: I believe using percent of GDP is a poor measure. Give me a percentage of your take home pay. Let me burn it in front of you in a dumpster. No worries! Its a small part of your take home pay!
    - monkmartinez 10y ago
      We already have a portion of our take home pay burned in front of us. Do you see that Medicare and Social Security deduction on your pay stub? Yeah......
      - toomuchtodo 10y ago
        That's called "paying for civilization" versus "lets bomb another 100k innocent civilians with precision guided munitions".
        monkmartinez 10y ago
        Hard to argue with that logic... wow.
      - zeveb 10y ago
        I wonder if all the folks downvoting you honestly believe that they will see a single penny of the Social Security they've been paying all these years? At least the military budget is a) constitutional b) a reasonable expenditure for a government (as opposed to a mutual-aid society).
mabbo 10y ago
3.3% of GDP but what percentage of tax dollars? It just seems a shame that a country that somehow can't afford to pay for the health care of it's citizens manages to lose track of literally trillions of dollars.
- trsohmers 10y ago
  US revenue (Primarily taxes) for FY2014 was $3.02 Trillion, while defense spending was ~$640 Billion, so you could guesstimate roughly 20% of tax dollars for defense. That ~$640 Billion is out of a ~$1.1 Trillion discretionary spending by the US, while non discretionary (mandatory, things like social security and medicare) spending is over $2.4 Trillion. If you add it all up, military spending makes up about 16% of total government spending.
- simonsarris 10y ago
  Oh my. Can someone check my numbers? France revenue: 953,000 million EUR Military budget: 41,300 million EUR (approx) = 4.33% of tax revenue military spending vs USA revenue: 4,260,000 million USD Military budget: 597,500 million USD = 14.03% of tax revenue military spending Damn. I used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... (2015 numbers) https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd... https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-france.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-france.pdf
  - gaius 10y ago
    I believe your numbers are accurate but I also don't think that they tell the whole story. Is France's subsidy of Airbus military spending? Because America's subsidy of Boeing is. Is French scientific research spending military? Because America spends its research dollars via DARPA. And so on...
  - sean2 10y ago
    If I understand your process, you multiplied US GDP by average tax burden, which makes sense, but here's another source that added other sources up: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/total_revenue_2015USrn http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/total_revenue_2015USrn and got ~6,500 billon USD for USA Revenue. Using the same military budget, that makes = 7.69% of tax on military budget. I think I see why everyone uses GDP: tax revenue is difficult to calculate, especially when it involves 50 states and a few territories.
sliverstorm 10y ago
2-e. Global stability & peace for 3.3% of GDP, I'd take it in a heartbeat. Edit: The middle east is a mess, sure, but all the superpowers seem mostly on amicable terms, which is a big deal if you look at the last few centuries.
- Fiahil 10y ago
  > 2-e. Global stability & peace for 3.3% of GDP, I'd take it in a heartbeat. Is this irony? Because, the gigantic mess we have now in middle east is absolutely not the result of massives US military spendings, a little more than 13 years ago...
  - DenisM 10y ago
    The Iraq war was a giant mistake and is still a giant mess. Yet isn't nearly as big it used to be. For perspective, compare this to the giant mess of the WW2, which was the last time the question of the world domination was up for debate. We're talking about roughly two orders of magnitude in human life cost (tens of millions vs hundreds of thousands).
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    WWII killed 4% of all humans on the planet. Perspective, please... For perspective on the Middle East, there is always "A Peace to End All Peace."
fizzbatter 10y ago
Holy cow, i thought something like %40 of the US economy went towards military? I have obviously never researched that, if anything i'm saying this because i believe my belief is somewhat common. Why do so many believe military/defense is so highly spent? Also, where the hell is all of our money going haha. I'm googling, some random images/sources/etc are saying that Military is ~19%, with social health/security/aid/etc being around ~60% percent. But the numbers in so many of these sources differ greatly. That, combined with your 3.3%, everything seems so drastically different. What were you basing your 3.3% off of?
- DenisM 10y ago
  http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_high_desc=true http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_h...
- ythl 10y ago
  > Holy cow, i thought something like %40 of the US economy went towards military No, you're thinking of welfare/social security Edit: anyone care to explain the downvotes? My data comes from here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/interactive-budget https://www.whitehouse.gov/interactive-budget Add together social security, income security, and other welfares, and you get ~40% of the budget.
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    No one likes to hear the truth. I gave you an upvote because saying that medicare, social security waste, and welfare are more expensive that the military ruins the little utopia's HN'ers have built up in their minds.
- catalinbraescu 10y ago
  3.3 from GDP. 19% from Federal budget.
- izacus 10y ago
  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.
izacus 10y ago
> 2-a. The Unites States spend 3.3% of it's GDP on the military. This is in line with other countries. Japan and EU are spending less only because they are under NATO (US) defense umbrella. France, for example, is at 2.1%, so 3.3% is hardly disproportionate. That's not true - majority of countries don't come close to speding 3.3% of their GDP on military (world's average is ~2.3%?). For example highest EU spenders are Poland with 2.2%, France with 2.1% and UK with 1.9%. Everyone else spends significantly less than 1.5%. And that's just looking at the % and ignoring the fact that USA has largest GDP in the world. US is nowhere near "in line with other countries." Unless you count "other countries" only the handful of Middle East countries like Oman, Israel, Jordan and Iraq. (Source: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_high_desc=true http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_h... )
- sremani 10y ago
  You know why Europeans get away spending pennies, coz Uncle Sam will come to their rescue when the big bad bear attacks them!
  - yongjik 10y ago
    It amuses me when Americans make this claim as if it's a badge of honor. I wonder what would they think if, say, America subsidizes Denmark's public schools so that Danish kids would pay less for textbooks than American kids.
    - theseatoms 10y ago
      If Americans got to choose the textbook content, they'd likely be very pleased with that arrangement.
    - sremani 10y ago
      Institutions have larger life, NATO is not dissolved after Cold-war, so we are on the same page when it comes to US should push its so called allies to pay more into NATO and do more, but for now the things are that way. It is not a badge of honor, I am stating the facts.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> 2-a. The Unites States spend 3.3% of it's GDP on the military. This is in line with other countries. No, its not "in line with other countries", generally speaking. 2.29% of world GDP is spent on military; the US's 3.3% is quite high. (I mean, its not Russia or Saudi Arabia high, but its nearly a time-and-a-half the global average, even after the distorting effect it has on the global average, given the US's huge share of world GDP.)
tuna-piano 10y ago
2-b: This is not true, and is a harmful and common fallacy. Keynesian economics is not permanent government spending. It's government spending only in rare cases of overall economic depression. In fact, what Keynes would argue is that if a depression occurred, you need government deficit spending to replace the decrease in the overall economy. This has nothing to do with the normal level of government spending in the economy. He didn't advocate digging holes and filling them back up as a normal thing - he advocated it only in rare cases of economic troubles.
- pm90 10y ago
  > He didn't advocate digging holes and filling them back up as a normal thing - he advocated it only in rare cases of economic troubles. He didn't advocate that even in case of economic troubles. I absolutely agree with the parent. US military spending is one of the major engines that powers the American economy and the American Research University system. Quite contrary to digging ditches and filling them back up, military funding trickles down to fund advanced mathematics, fundamental science and so on: even if indirectly. While its true that economic growth can be achieved without Keynesian economics, it is hard to sustain economic growth and prosperity at levels that the US has managed to do. While its not all because of the Military, they have had a large (although little acknowledged) hand.
  - josho 10y ago
    > US military spending is one of the major engines that powers the American economy I always get lost on this argument. Americans largely see socialism as evil (obvious consequence of the cold war). Yet, the argument put forward above is essentially arguing for a special form of socialism that applies only to military contractors.
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      Yep. "To provide for the Common Defense" is in our Conftituion. It may be worth reading a bio of Eisenhower to see just how big a shift the pre-WWII drawdown was to the post-WWII equilibrium ( after a span). America was founded against the idea of a standing army for almost all its history.
josho 10y ago
2-a. 2.1% to 3.3% is a 44% difference. So, yes, I'd argue that is disproportionate. The difference is compounded by the fact that the US is the largest economy. So, I think disproportionate is the right term. The rest of your points skirt the question. Spending on the military isn't supposed to be the driver for the economy or the engine for innovation, those are side benefits. If those really are the goals then the citizens should be demanding that money be spent directly to achieve those benefits. I find it curious that argument is never put forward.
- Thriptic 10y ago
  Sadly directly funding basic research or even translational research is not nearly as popular politically as funding military research. Basic research is often deemed wasteful by the public.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  > I find it curious that argument is never put forward. Because the argument you're making isn't a good argument. The perceived waste would just happen in a different "industrial complex" with the perception that security is now weaker. Right or wrong, perceptions are what they are.
  - gillygill 10y ago
    > The perceived waste would just happen in a different "industrial complex" But with significantly less waste of human life.
- hellogoodbyeeee 10y ago
  The US spends 57% more on military than France. France spends 36% less on their military than the US. Your 44% doesn't really make sense.
  - josho 10y ago
    The percentage difference between 2.1% and 3.3% is 44%.
sandworm101 10y ago
>> Japan and EU are spending less only because they are under NATO (US) defense umbrella. You forget the amount allies spend because of US forces. Canada in particular spends much on accommodating US demands and on systems to better integrate with US forces. Does anyone here think Canada would even consider spending money on the f-35 if the US wasn't first so committed? (Fyi, as an example of the integration, about 1/3 of the people watching things inside Cheyenne mountain are Canadian.)
- serge2k 10y ago
  No, we would have just bought new F-18s from the US. Canada and the US are about the 2 closest allies you can find. Integrating with the larger US military makes sense, especially with Russia around.
hellogoodbyeeee 10y ago
>France, for example, is at 2.1%, so 3.3% is hardly disproportionate. You just said the US spends 50% more on the military than France. ((3.3-2.1)/2.1= .57). That is a very large difference
noobermin 10y ago
It is 3.3% of GDP but it accounts for 16% of our total federal spending in 2015. Percent of GDP is a good metric, but it needs to be tempered with the amount we reap in taxes. I'm sure it's an easy calculation/google search, but I need to work now.
raverbashing 10y ago
2-a reminds me of something: Biggest Air Force: USAF 2nd Biggest Air Force: US Navy That's how much the US spends
- gaius 10y ago
  3rd biggest: The US Navy's Army's Air Force...
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Now consider that in exchange for the 1.3% the US managed to snag the first place in the high-tech industry with a huge lead over the rest of the world No, it didn't do that in exchange for "1.3%". Both the world and the US rates of military spending right now are much lower than most of the period over which that occurred, and the ratio of US to world average share of GDP spent on the military was higher through most of the period; e.g., in 1988 (which wasn't the peak for either) world military spending was 3.4% of GDP, US was 5.6%.) > Look, I dislike people-killing as much as the next guy. But you can't ignore the economic realities The US government could take the share of GDP it spends above the world average on military spending, and spend it directly on civilian technology and technical infrastructure and produce more benefits in terms of the tech industry then any side benefit it gets tangentially from military spending (plus, produce more direct benefits for domestic quality of life.)
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
"...is the cornerstone of Keynesian economy". Yep. One of the Bush Administration's top guys was actually caught making this argument for the adventure in Iraq. My jaw dropped. Actual people-killing is an extremely limited part of our military. As pork, it has the justification of "provide for the common defense" and generally, bipartisan support.

by DenisM 10y ago

FireBeyond 10y ago

2a - Relativity. France is at 2.1%, US 3.3%. In other words the US is spending fifty seven per cent more than France. How is that "hardly disproportionate"? What's that quote? "The US spends more on defense than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom we list as allies".

toomuchtodo 10y ago

I disagree that our military spending is reasonable, or a bargain. http://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison http://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison http://i.imgur.com/PhHo3eh.gif http://i.imgur.com/PhHo3eh.gif "The United states spends more on defense than the next seven countries combined."

Viper007Bond 10y ago
That's in absolute dollars though. A percentage of GDP is a much more fair comparison.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  It's not though; it's still a poor way to spend taxpayer dollars with entitlement liabilities accumulating, that are unfunded, while we continue to poor money into military waste, regardless of the percentage of GDP. EDIT: I believe using percent of GDP is a poor measure. Give me a percentage of your take home pay. Let me burn it in front of you in a dumpster. No worries! Its a small part of your take home pay!
  - monkmartinez 10y ago
    We already have a portion of our take home pay burned in front of us. Do you see that Medicare and Social Security deduction on your pay stub? Yeah......
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      That's called "paying for civilization" versus "lets bomb another 100k innocent civilians with precision guided munitions".
      - monkmartinez 10y ago
        Hard to argue with that logic... wow.
    - zeveb 10y ago
      I wonder if all the folks downvoting you honestly believe that they will see a single penny of the Social Security they've been paying all these years? At least the military budget is a) constitutional b) a reasonable expenditure for a government (as opposed to a mutual-aid society).

mabbo 10y ago

3.3% of GDP but what percentage of tax dollars? It just seems a shame that a country that somehow can't afford to pay for the health care of it's citizens manages to lose track of literally trillions of dollars.

trsohmers 10y ago
US revenue (Primarily taxes) for FY2014 was $3.02 Trillion, while defense spending was ~$640 Billion, so you could guesstimate roughly 20% of tax dollars for defense. That ~$640 Billion is out of a ~$1.1 Trillion discretionary spending by the US, while non discretionary (mandatory, things like social security and medicare) spending is over $2.4 Trillion. If you add it all up, military spending makes up about 16% of total government spending.
simonsarris 10y ago
Oh my. Can someone check my numbers? France revenue: 953,000 million EUR Military budget: 41,300 million EUR (approx) = 4.33% of tax revenue military spending vs USA revenue: 4,260,000 million USD Military budget: 597,500 million USD = 14.03% of tax revenue military spending Damn. I used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... (2015 numbers) https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd... https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-france.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-france.pdf
- gaius 10y ago
  I believe your numbers are accurate but I also don't think that they tell the whole story. Is France's subsidy of Airbus military spending? Because America's subsidy of Boeing is. Is French scientific research spending military? Because America spends its research dollars via DARPA. And so on...
- sean2 10y ago
  If I understand your process, you multiplied US GDP by average tax burden, which makes sense, but here's another source that added other sources up: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/total_revenue_2015USrn http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/total_revenue_2015USrn and got ~6,500 billon USD for USA Revenue. Using the same military budget, that makes = 7.69% of tax on military budget. I think I see why everyone uses GDP: tax revenue is difficult to calculate, especially when it involves 50 states and a few territories.

sliverstorm 10y ago

2-e. Global stability & peace for 3.3% of GDP, I'd take it in a heartbeat. Edit: The middle east is a mess, sure, but all the superpowers seem mostly on amicable terms, which is a big deal if you look at the last few centuries.

Fiahil 10y ago
> 2-e. Global stability & peace for 3.3% of GDP, I'd take it in a heartbeat. Is this irony? Because, the gigantic mess we have now in middle east is absolutely not the result of massives US military spendings, a little more than 13 years ago...
- DenisM 10y ago
  The Iraq war was a giant mistake and is still a giant mess. Yet isn't nearly as big it used to be. For perspective, compare this to the giant mess of the WW2, which was the last time the question of the world domination was up for debate. We're talking about roughly two orders of magnitude in human life cost (tens of millions vs hundreds of thousands).
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  WWII killed 4% of all humans on the planet. Perspective, please... For perspective on the Middle East, there is always "A Peace to End All Peace."

fizzbatter 10y ago

Holy cow, i thought something like %40 of the US economy went towards military? I have obviously never researched that, if anything i'm saying this because i believe my belief is somewhat common. Why do so many believe military/defense is so highly spent? Also, where the hell is all of our money going haha. I'm googling, some random images/sources/etc are saying that Military is ~19%, with social health/security/aid/etc being around ~60% percent. But the numbers in so many of these sources differ greatly. That, combined with your 3.3%, everything seems so drastically different. What were you basing your 3.3% off of?

DenisM 10y ago
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_high_desc=true http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_h...
ythl 10y ago
> Holy cow, i thought something like %40 of the US economy went towards military No, you're thinking of welfare/social security Edit: anyone care to explain the downvotes? My data comes from here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/interactive-budget https://www.whitehouse.gov/interactive-budget Add together social security, income security, and other welfares, and you get ~40% of the budget.
- monkmartinez 10y ago
  No one likes to hear the truth. I gave you an upvote because saying that medicare, social security waste, and welfare are more expensive that the military ruins the little utopia's HN'ers have built up in their minds.
catalinbraescu 10y ago
3.3 from GDP. 19% from Federal budget.
izacus 10y ago
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.

izacus 10y ago

> 2-a. The Unites States spend 3.3% of it's GDP on the military. This is in line with other countries. Japan and EU are spending less only because they are under NATO (US) defense umbrella. France, for example, is at 2.1%, so 3.3% is hardly disproportionate. That's not true - majority of countries don't come close to speding 3.3% of their GDP on military (world's average is ~2.3%?). For example highest EU spenders are Poland with 2.2%, France with 2.1% and UK with 1.9%. Everyone else spends significantly less than 1.5%. And that's just looking at the % and ignoring the fact that USA has largest GDP in the world. US is nowhere near "in line with other countries." Unless you count "other countries" only the handful of Middle East countries like Oman, Israel, Jordan and Iraq. (Source: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_high_desc=true http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?year_h... )

sremani 10y ago
You know why Europeans get away spending pennies, coz Uncle Sam will come to their rescue when the big bad bear attacks them!
- yongjik 10y ago
  It amuses me when Americans make this claim as if it's a badge of honor. I wonder what would they think if, say, America subsidizes Denmark's public schools so that Danish kids would pay less for textbooks than American kids.
  - theseatoms 10y ago
    If Americans got to choose the textbook content, they'd likely be very pleased with that arrangement.
  - sremani 10y ago
    Institutions have larger life, NATO is not dissolved after Cold-war, so we are on the same page when it comes to US should push its so called allies to pay more into NATO and do more, but for now the things are that way. It is not a badge of honor, I am stating the facts.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> 2-a. The Unites States spend 3.3% of it's GDP on the military. This is in line with other countries. No, its not "in line with other countries", generally speaking. 2.29% of world GDP is spent on military; the US's 3.3% is quite high. (I mean, its not Russia or Saudi Arabia high, but its nearly a time-and-a-half the global average, even after the distorting effect it has on the global average, given the US's huge share of world GDP.)

tuna-piano 10y ago

2-b: This is not true, and is a harmful and common fallacy. Keynesian economics is not permanent government spending. It's government spending only in rare cases of overall economic depression. In fact, what Keynes would argue is that if a depression occurred, you need government deficit spending to replace the decrease in the overall economy. This has nothing to do with the normal level of government spending in the economy. He didn't advocate digging holes and filling them back up as a normal thing - he advocated it only in rare cases of economic troubles.

pm90 10y ago
> He didn't advocate digging holes and filling them back up as a normal thing - he advocated it only in rare cases of economic troubles. He didn't advocate that even in case of economic troubles. I absolutely agree with the parent. US military spending is one of the major engines that powers the American economy and the American Research University system. Quite contrary to digging ditches and filling them back up, military funding trickles down to fund advanced mathematics, fundamental science and so on: even if indirectly. While its true that economic growth can be achieved without Keynesian economics, it is hard to sustain economic growth and prosperity at levels that the US has managed to do. While its not all because of the Military, they have had a large (although little acknowledged) hand.
- josho 10y ago
  > US military spending is one of the major engines that powers the American economy I always get lost on this argument. Americans largely see socialism as evil (obvious consequence of the cold war). Yet, the argument put forward above is essentially arguing for a special form of socialism that applies only to military contractors.
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    Yep. "To provide for the Common Defense" is in our Conftituion. It may be worth reading a bio of Eisenhower to see just how big a shift the pre-WWII drawdown was to the post-WWII equilibrium ( after a span). America was founded against the idea of a standing army for almost all its history.

josho 10y ago

2-a. 2.1% to 3.3% is a 44% difference. So, yes, I'd argue that is disproportionate. The difference is compounded by the fact that the US is the largest economy. So, I think disproportionate is the right term. The rest of your points skirt the question. Spending on the military isn't supposed to be the driver for the economy or the engine for innovation, those are side benefits. If those really are the goals then the citizens should be demanding that money be spent directly to achieve those benefits. I find it curious that argument is never put forward.

Thriptic 10y ago
Sadly directly funding basic research or even translational research is not nearly as popular politically as funding military research. Basic research is often deemed wasteful by the public.
monkmartinez 10y ago
> I find it curious that argument is never put forward. Because the argument you're making isn't a good argument. The perceived waste would just happen in a different "industrial complex" with the perception that security is now weaker. Right or wrong, perceptions are what they are.
- gillygill 10y ago
  > The perceived waste would just happen in a different "industrial complex" But with significantly less waste of human life.
hellogoodbyeeee 10y ago
The US spends 57% more on military than France. France spends 36% less on their military than the US. Your 44% doesn't really make sense.
- josho 10y ago
  The percentage difference between 2.1% and 3.3% is 44%.

sandworm101 10y ago

>> Japan and EU are spending less only because they are under NATO (US) defense umbrella. You forget the amount allies spend because of US forces. Canada in particular spends much on accommodating US demands and on systems to better integrate with US forces. Does anyone here think Canada would even consider spending money on the f-35 if the US wasn't first so committed? (Fyi, as an example of the integration, about 1/3 of the people watching things inside Cheyenne mountain are Canadian.)

serge2k 10y ago
No, we would have just bought new F-18s from the US. Canada and the US are about the 2 closest allies you can find. Integrating with the larger US military makes sense, especially with Russia around.

hellogoodbyeeee 10y ago

>France, for example, is at 2.1%, so 3.3% is hardly disproportionate. You just said the US spends 50% more on the military than France. ((3.3-2.1)/2.1= .57). That is a very large difference

noobermin 10y ago

It is 3.3% of GDP but it accounts for 16% of our total federal spending in 2015. Percent of GDP is a good metric, but it needs to be tempered with the amount we reap in taxes. I'm sure it's an easy calculation/google search, but I need to work now.

raverbashing 10y ago

2-a reminds me of something: Biggest Air Force: USAF 2nd Biggest Air Force: US Navy That's how much the US spends

gaius 10y ago
3rd biggest: The US Navy's Army's Air Force...

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Now consider that in exchange for the 1.3% the US managed to snag the first place in the high-tech industry with a huge lead over the rest of the world No, it didn't do that in exchange for "1.3%". Both the world and the US rates of military spending right now are much lower than most of the period over which that occurred, and the ratio of US to world average share of GDP spent on the military was higher through most of the period; e.g., in 1988 (which wasn't the peak for either) world military spending was 3.4% of GDP, US was 5.6%.) > Look, I dislike people-killing as much as the next guy. But you can't ignore the economic realities The US government could take the share of GDP it spends above the world average on military spending, and spend it directly on civilian technology and technical infrastructure and produce more benefits in terms of the tech industry then any side benefit it gets tangentially from military spending (plus, produce more direct benefits for domestic quality of life.)

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

"...is the cornerstone of Keynesian economy". Yep. One of the Bush Administration's top guys was actually caught making this argument for the adventure in Iraq. My jaw dropped. Actual people-killing is an extremely limited part of our military. As pork, it has the justification of "provide for the common defense" and generally, bipartisan support.