Rising Hegemon
The Unites States, with costly military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, increased spending by 2.8 percent to $698 billion -- about six times as much as China, the second-biggest spender ahead of Britain, France and Russia. In 2009, U.S. spending grew 7.7 percent.
"The United States has increased its military spending by 81 percent since 2001," SIPRI said. "At 4.8 percent of gross domestic product, U.S. military spending in 2010 represents the largest economic burden outside the Middle East," said SIPRI Military Expenditure Project chief Sam Perlo-Freeman.
God forbid, we spend slightly less money on bombing and occupying places as a means of reducing the deficit. That would be logical and smart, and completely un-merkin!
2 comments:
As usual, the percentage of GDP figures are based on the annual military appropriations bill, and not on the aggregate spending on all defense/security/intelligence/surveillance functions that can be generally classified as defense, i.e., DHS, CIA, DCI's office, NSA, DoD, DoS Intelligence, domestic surveillance, FBI intelligence shops, off-budget war funding, and all the other places where defense money is squirreled away--and the portion of interest on the debt related to defense spending.
Add up all of those and it's well over a trillion dollars--closer to 10% of GDP, and close to 80% of the discretionary budget.
It's kind of like the government's insistence upon using the U3 unemployment figure instead of the U6, which is lot closer to reality--heaven forbid our government lets the public know the actual costs, just as we're not supposed to think about the actual unemployment rate....
grover norquist is getting giddy.
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