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Exaggerating China’s military spending, the St. Louis Fed's misleading graph
- hunglee2 4y agoincredible. I was obliquely reminded of Donald Trump's sharpie incident, similar kind of crude misrepresentation of data
- verdverm 4y agoUnderstanding the opaque Russian or Chinese military budget is not straight forward. One cannot simply compare headline numbers. Countries put money into military endeavors differently. Some examples: (1) The US nuclear programs are under the DoE, which are included in the projections. Not so with other countries. (2) Russian and Chinese have internal military police and national/coast guard, which are budgeted separately. (3) Russia has significant corruption. The headline numbers are significantly reduced as they move through the system. Another thing to consider is that dollar figures do not map onto capability. The US spends more on personnel by comparison. Purchasing parity is obviously different between the countries. To learn more, here are two places to start - https://news.usni.org/2021/10/26/mystery-shrouds-chinese-defense-spending https://news.usni.org/2021/10/26/mystery-shrouds-chinese-def... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH5TlcMo_m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH5TlcMo_m4