In January of 2013, I wrote this post about U.S. Military spending. Most of the numbers and basic facts, as well as my suggestions on what to cut still stand today, three years later (the numbers used here are for 2014). However, there are some developments that I should point out:
I put these numbers in a chart ranking the top ten military spenders in the world.
The U.S. still spends more than the next NINE COUNTRIES COMBINED on the military, yet the population of the U.S. (321 million) is about one tenth of that of all those countries combined (3.1 billion). So overall we’re spending more than 10 times as much per capita as every other country in the world on the military. And this is AFTER all the “terrible” cuts by Obama.
Interestingly, with the rise of Saudi Arabia in this chart, they are above our ranking in spending per capita. The U.S. does about twice the spending of the major European nations per capita, about four times that of Russia and 18 times that of China.
When I listen to the Republican candidates during the debates, they are ripping into the current administration for slashing the military budget and destroying our military capability.
Really?
Are they telling me that it takes ten times the spending per capita of the next nine countries combined to defend our country?
Are we getting that much less value for our spending than China and Russia?
Seriously?
Or are we just spending stupidly, to use a Trump term?
Perhaps we should stop spending our military money in other countries. We’re not defending the United States and its citizens. We’re blowing money on the military industrial complex which has a vested interest in wars going on overseas all the time.
We are fanning the flames of terrorism on purpose. We’re killing innocent civilians and children by the scores with our drones. And at home we’re telling the voters that we have to be afraid of terrorists killing us.
Fear works.
None of this makes any sense to me.
To me it doesn’t make sense to spend so very much money destroying things and then turn around and spend more money to rebuild them. We need to adopt a non-interventionist policy that made us the heroes of WWI and WWII. Right now we are losing the moral high-ground. It is difficult to defeat an enemy fighting a religious war especially when they can clearly identify our moral failures.
I honestly believe we’re the ones creating the terrorist. Every son of every innocent man we killed (by accident) is a potential and highly likely terrorist when he grows up. It’s a terrorist factory.
Exactly.
Reblogged this on Norbert Haupt and commented:
I wrote this article a year ago about the comparative sizes of the U.S. Military, and in broad strokes the numbers are still good today. Trump just said that we need to add another $50 billion a year to our military spending. Seriously?