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.
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.
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.
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
Here is the original of the chart that AOL cropped incorrectly. http://www.iiss.org/publications/mi...tement/figure-comparative-defence-statistics/ Here is the link to the AOL article that shows they cropped the chart incorrectly - http://defense.aol.com/2012/03/16/the-military-imbalance-how-the-u-s-outspends-the-world/
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.
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?
Here, let's visualize things this way. Here is a picture of a puppy. Lets pretend that it represents what we spend on defense. 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.)
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?
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.
