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SlyPokerDog said:
military_spending_us_vs_world.gif
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us-military-spending-chart-world.jpg
 
BrianFromWA said:
Putting aside the analysis of how big the military needs to be to keep the American lifestyle going...


This isn't true, and hasn't been true for about 5 years. The only major players decreasing defense spending are US and Western Europe. China and Russia (among many others) have been having double-digit % increases in spending for almost a decade.

And our (unsigned) budget for FY13 has DoD getting 673B (including Overseas Contingency Ops--read, War in Afghanistan) out of 3.8T spent. That's 17%, not 1/3.
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I said military spending AND DEBT INTEREST.

Your $673B + $454B

Out of about $3.6T

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/ir/ir_expense.htm
 
Donkiez didn't. And the FY13 "Spend Plan" requested says $3.803T, but whatever.

SPD's graphs show that in just 2 years we went from 48% of the world's military expenditures to 42.8%. In 2011, it went down even further to 41%, as the US decreased military spending and the ROW increased to $1738B.

And that interest payment on the debt is much more a share of the continued subsidization of the Medicare/Medicaid program that is overrun by almost $900B a year. To repeat...you could pay every dollar that you pay to the DoD to cover the overrun (debt accrued) on the Medicare/Medicaid program and you'd still be 250B in the hole.
 
I missread Denny's post. My point is still the same however, we spend way to much on "defense" and the numbers are still stagering. You can't convince me that that is fine because we spend way more on our deficit interest and we are ONLY at 41% of the world military spending rather than over 50%. Especially when that is over 30% more than the next countries military budget.
 
It's not fine. It should be higher, based on what you the citizen expect it to do.
 
Leave it to a republican to tell me what my expectations are.
 
BrianFromWA said:
It's not fine. It should be higher, based on what you the citizen expect it to do.
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I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that our military budget should be higher and be based on what the average citizen expects our military to be able to do or are you talking about something else?
 
You (donkiez) were also the one who brought up the "we spend more than the rest of the world combined". Yes, but NK doesn't pay its troops much, so the fact that their normal, active standing army (not including reserves) is 2.5x ours---or that the Chinese Red Army is about 5x the size of ours--doesn't correlate. Our navy is charged with protecting US economic interests around the world...something that the Chinese and Russian ones, for example, aren't worried about. Our air force buys super-expensive precision bombs because we get our panties in a twist every time a dozen civilians are killed (and prohibit ourselves from using land or sea mines), while the Russians showed in Chechnya and Georgia that they share no such compunctions.
 
SlyPokerDog said:
I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that our military budget should be higher and be based on what the average citizen expects our military to be able to do or are you talking about something else?
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I'm saying that the level of military spending in the US (as a % of GDP) is the lowest since 1938. I'm saying that the expectations and missions placed upon the military (as promulgated in the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy and National Maritime Strategy/Naval Operations Concept, to name just 3 that I deal with) are still at a higher optempo than the US was for the 30 years 1973-2003 (outside of 6 months for Desert Storm). I'm saying that we are much more dependent on foreign trade (90% of which travels by water) than at any point since the Civil War, and that to protect the shipping lanes and trade requires forward-deployed forces, airplanes and ships.

Mandates from the government (President, SecDef, SecNav) to do things like "go green" and use biofuels that need billions in seed money and end up costing 6-10x as much as regular fuel are also cutting into readiness at a time when budgets are going away. I'm not saying they are or aren't good programs, but the expectations from our civilian masters to "be green" while we fight is an additional one that we haven't had before, and causing the military to spend to play catch-up.
 
People tell me I'm a republican, though I'd cut the defense budget by at least 1/3 if not even 1/2 or more.

The reason we spend so much is severalfold.

We spend 2-3% of our GDP and our GDP is like 1/3 of the entire world's GDP. Turns out to be a really big amount of money.

We are the free world's police force. With that 1/3 of the world's GDP comes some responsibility and incentive to assure there is free enough trade to achieve that kind of success.

When other nations were armed in the past, there were bloody wars on the european continent repeatedly, each becoming more gruesome than the previous ones. Now those countries have a tiny military and there's peace, but it wouldn't be there without NATO. We contribute pretty much the entire military force to NATO.
 
BrianFromWA said:
I'm saying that the level of military spending in the US (as a % of GDP) is the lowest since 1938. I'm saying that the expectations and missions placed upon the military (as promulgated in the National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy and National Maritime Strategy/Naval Operations Concept, to name just 3 that I deal with) are still at a higher optempo than the US was for the 30 years 1973-2003 (outside of 6 months for Desert Storm). I'm saying that we are much more dependent on foreign trade (90% of which travels by water) than at any point since the Civil War, and that to protect the shipping lanes and trade requires forward-deployed forces, airplanes and ships.

Mandates from the government (President, SecDef, SecNav) to do things like "go green" and use biofuels that need billions in seed money and end up costing 6-10x as much as regular fuel are also cutting into readiness at a time when budgets are going away. I'm not saying they are or aren't good programs, but the expectations from our civilian masters to "be green" while we fight is an additional one that we haven't had before, and causing the military to spend to play catch-up.
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Good post! I agree with you on the biofuel crap.
 
Denny Crane said:
People tell me I'm a republican, though I'd cut the defense budget by at least 1/3 if not even 1/2 or more.

The reason we spend so much is severalfold.

We spend 2-3% of our GDP and our GDP is like 1/3 of the entire world's GDP. Turns out to be a really big amount of money.

We are the free world's police force. With that 1/3 of the world's GDP comes some responsibility and incentive to assure there is free enough trade to achieve that kind of success.

When other nations were armed in the past, there were bloody wars on the european continent repeatedly, each becoming more gruesome than the previous ones. Now those countries have a tiny military and there's peace, but it wouldn't be there without NATO. We contribute pretty much the entire military force to NATO.
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defence-budgets-and-expenditure---iiss.jpg
 
Your chart is nonsense.

739.3 is not a % of GDP.

If you look at virtually any kind of spending: education, roads/highways, retirement, health care, etc., the USA dwarfs the other nations as well.

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS

Our military spending as a % of GDP is similar to:
Russia, Yemen, UAE, Timor-Leste, Syria, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Pakistan, Oman, Morocco, Ecuador, Columbia, Armenia, etc.
 
SlyPokerDog said:
You need to read the top of the chart, not just the bottom.
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I wrote "we spend 2-3% of GDP on military" and you respond with a graphic that has % of GDP on it. Misleading.
 
If the West didn't have an unsustainable lifestyle, we wouldn't have to think of never-ending growth as the only thing our economy should be doing. Eventually, shit is going to hit the fan and we're going to look back and wonder why we didn't try to downsize.
 
Denny Crane said:
I wrote "we spend 2-3% of GDP on military" and you respond with a graphic that has % of GDP on it. Misleading.
Click to expand...

Do you see the little box around the pie charts? Do you see the start of the box around the words "2011 Top 10 Defense Budgets as a % of GDP*" ? For some reason there is part of a second chart included on the bottom of the first chart. It doesn't makes the first chart misleading unless you are only looking to argue with someone.

And I posted that chart in response to, "Now those countries have a tiny military and there's peace, but it wouldn't be there without NATO. We contribute pretty much the entire military force to NATO." We contribute a lot towards NATO but I thought it was interesting that Britain and France spend more on their military then Russia does. That's a hell of a lot of money being spent on "a tiny military."

Also according to this chart the USA spends 4.8% of GDP on military.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/apr/17/military-spending-countries-list
 
being misleading in a political discussion?

balderdash
 
If you want to visualize things this way.... Take that big 739.3 circle and multiply it by 20x. That's the US GDP. Multiply it by 3x and you get the UK's GDP.
 
Denny Crane said:
If you want to visualize things this way.... Take that big 739.3 circle and multiply it by 20x. That's the US GDP. Multiply it by 3x and you get the UK's GDP.
Click to expand...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Yes Denny, we spend 1/20th of the GDP on defense so if you wanted to make a circle representing our GDP it would be 20x larger then the circle representing what we spend 1/20th of it on.

The real question here is do you think that scary big 739.3 circle still represents the % of GDP we spend on defense?
 
Denny Crane said:
If you want to visualize things this way.... Take that big 739.3 circle and multiply it by 20x. That's the US GDP. Multiply it by 3x and you get the UK's GDP.
Click to expand...

Here, let's visualize things this way.

Here is a picture of a puppy. Lets pretend that it represents what we spend on defense.

puppy.png




Now if one puppy represents what we spend on defense than a picture of 20 puppies would represent what our total GDP is. (Just ignore the kid.)

cameron_and_20_puppies.jpg
 
The way the math works, a small % of a very big number is a big number.

If you want to count 100% of govt. spending as defense, go for it. As a % of our GDP, our govt. spending is not as high as many countries, nor as low as many.

Do you have a point you're trying to make?
 
hoojacks said:
If the West didn't have an unsustainable lifestyle, we wouldn't have to think of never-ending growth as the only thing our economy should be doing. Eventually, shit is going to hit the fan and we're going to look back and wonder why we didn't try to downsize.
Click to expand...

The only part of our lifestyle that is "unsustainable" is the shit people want without working. Social security and Medicare at 65 was fine when life expectency was 68 or 70; it doesn't work with today's life expectancy. If we raise our retirement age to 72-74, we fix a lot of problems.

Who says there's a cap on our lifestyle? As long as we innovate, we have a brighter future.
 
maxiep said:
The only part of our lifestyle that is "unsustainable" is the shit people want without working. Social security and Medicare at 65 was fine when life expectency was 68 or 70; it doesn't work with today's life expectancy. If we raise our retirement age to 72-74, we fix a lot of problems.

Who says there's a cap on our lifestyle? As long as we innovate, we have a brighter future.
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It was even better when life expectancy was 61.
 
maxiep said:
The only part of our lifestyle that is "unsustainable" is the shit people want without working. Social security and Medicare at 65 was fine when life expectency was 68 or 70; it doesn't work with today's life expectancy. If we raise our retirement age to 72-74, we fix a lot of problems.

Who says there's a cap on our lifestyle? As long as we innovate, we have a brighter future.
Click to expand...

We live in a linear system and have finite resources. Unsustainable.
 
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