Sunday, January 30, 2011

Where's The Money?

In all of the heated rhetoric surrounding deficits, debt, budgets, and where we are going to get the revenues to pay for the services we all desire, why do we ignore the glaringly inefficient, unneeded, unnecessary, and gratuitously bloated military budget?

The second largest military (China) spend 6.7 times less than the United States. We spend $660+ billion, while China spends almost $99 billion. Canada and Germany only spend 1.3% of their GDP on military expense. The U.S. spends 4.3%. Only spending as much as these two other highly productive and advanced nations would equal a 70 percent reduction in our military spending. Our military budget would only be $198 billion. A savings of $462 billion.

But, for arguments sake, lets assume we could have an equally effective military spending just 4 times what China spends. We'd still be spending just under $400 billion. But we'd now have over $260 billion to spend on infrastructure, education, health care, Medicare, debt, etc.

A much better bang for the buck. (No pun intended.)

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