I'll admit to not having great command of the statistics, but I don't see how the numbers you posted refute any of my points, and I don't appreciate your little

I'll admit to not having great command of the statistics, but I don't see how the numbers you posted refute any of my points, and I don't appreciate your little quip of condescension at the end. First, spending on social security, medicare, income security, and domestic programs is of a qualitatively different nature than military spending, bailouts, and the interest payments you mention in that it is inserted directly into the real economy instead of being diverted and for the most part removed for good. Yes, some small portion of the military budget really is for 'National Defense' and so would come closer to domestic spending, and perhaps some portion of the bailout funds wind up in the economy instead of banks in Zurich or Dubai, but the bulk of it is simply absconded. So you must strongly weight the impacts of these different types of expenditures in relation to each other to gauge their true comparative impacts, which you haven't addressed. Second, the monetary base is only a small part of the picture since this only includes physical currency and highly liquid assets. $1.2T is an enormous expansion that constitutes a doubling of the base, but much more important are M3 and MZM since these include credit, which contributes exponentially more to inflation and wealth transfer due to fractional reserve banking, which is only possible on anything remotely close to this scale in a fiat system. This graph illustrates my point quite well, and it only shows up to M2, presumably since the Fed stopped reporting the even more damning statistics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Components_of_US_Money_supply.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Components_of_US_Money_sup.... So again you have ignored or confused critical factors. The last point you left unaddressed is opportunity cost, which is really the core of my argument. In a sound economy with sufficient resources available, the capital stock (wealth) increases on an exponential scale, not linearly, because the more capital that exists, the more that can be invested in creating even more capital. Therefore, interfering with this process of accumulation through wealth transfers and the instability caused by monetary manipulations has deceptively gargantuan opportunity costs. All the resources that are funneled into bombs and guns are employed in actively destroying capital when they would otherwise be accelerating its accumulation. Likewise for resources funneled into estates, yachts, and private jets for finance industry billionaires that SHOULD have gone into producing capital goods for the real economy. If you truly consider the full consequences of these policies and the functional relationships involved, the implications are almost unbelievably staggering.