Hold up. I see three NATO countries in that top-spending list, yet Trump is crying that they don’t spend enough? It seems, as everyone seems to agree, that the problem is the US spends way too much. But since US “defense” spending is an obvious grift to shift public money to private pockets this isn’t too surprising.
Well he wants to dial up the grift of shifting other nato members’ public money into US MIC private pockets
Stop calling it defense.
The government did already
It’s officially war spending now.
Socialize (military) spending, vassalize smaller countries, privatize wealth, that’s the american way of running businesses
2 Trillions that could have been invested in education, science and welfare instead.
and health. Don’t forget health. Americans would actually SAVE money if they socialised healthcare.
Isn’t it “War Spending” now?
alwayswasmeme.jpg
One thing to keep in mind is that defense spending tends to rely heavily on local provision. You generally can’t just import soldiers, and keeping military-industrial supply chains local or at minimum trusted is also a requirement. So using something like a PPP-adjusted figure rather than a nominal figure is probably going to be closer to what you’re actually buying, and that rather considerably diminishes the difference.
kagis for someone discussing the matter
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-military-rise-comparative-military-spending-china-and-us
Given current data, China’s military expenditure in PPP terms is estimated to be $541 billion, or 59% of US spending, and its equipment levels are only 42% of US levels. Comparing trends over time shows that the US has matched China in recent years, albeit at the cost of a much higher defence burden.
The underlying mechanism here is that China has a lot of people who will work for rather-lower wages than in the US, which means that each nominal dollar China budgets for their military can buy them more military capacity than in the US, via taking advantage of those lower wages.
If the US had a large supply of workers willing to work at Chinese wages, and could use them to drive its military and military-industrial system, that wouldn’t be a factor.
China also owns their own resources while the US doesn’t so the US has to pay a middle man to build anything.
Also, this probably includes what the US sells.
deleted by creator
“War” spending, now.
Edit: I am slow
I think it’s a somewhat credible theory I’ve heard that a large portion of our “defense” spending goes towards larger and larger bribes to countries around the world either to not go to war or to maintain trade relations with the United States in order to maintain U.S. hegemony.
And most of it goes either into super inflated prices for the most silly things, or into projects that no one can talk about and are unsupervised.
its “necessary” once you figure out that when people get tired of the complications caused by it, they are willing to use the military to quash discent on behalf of the elite class, to maintain control.
all i know is, i play warhammer total war 3 a lot. and when my skavens are starving and start an uprising, i just send a lord with his army to quash the discenters, and maintain control.
simple as.
Isn’t the USA numbers very skewed because they include like healthcare and pensions in their numbers, even for former soldiers, while say europeans don’t?
Also, (and I’m no kind of expert) it seems there’s a lot of graft involved in the spending, such as $67 charged for a screw, and that kind of thing. A good bit of it due to a kickback-type arrangement between the politicians involved (think Dick Cheney) and the defense contractors who get awarded the deals.
Some of those “$50 screw” numbers come from cancelling projects with high total cost. A contract might be paid to produce a thousand of something and get cancelled after making 10 of them, inflating the per unit cost by a ton
Thanks for the clarification. I was indeed just parroting what I’d heard & read several times, without really understanding the mechanisms involved.
well, it’s only some. Plus there’s plenty of conspiracy theories around those types of costs being how the gov funds secret projects.
Well that still counts as stupid ways to waste money, with a side of corruption
yep. plenty of money in defense wasted due to stupidity.
The Army manual says that screw must meet X, Y, and Z specs. If you don’t have the tooling for those exact specs, you’re going to charge more to make up the cost of retooling.
Of course there’s grift and plain foolishness. Local base Commander paid a painter I knew to stop work for two weeks and screw around waiting for his commander to visit. Wanted the boss to see the painters in action, look busy.
Speaking of specs, there are old rules that never changed. Worked at a print shop where a standard 24x36" blueprint was $.63. Nope. Navy had to have the final set of plans printed on plastic media, $3/page. Now multiply by 150 for a modest set of prints.
Meant to reply to you:
i think its a very small percentage, only 62billion goes to healthcare in the defense budget. half goes to defense contractors, which is huge.
I read it brings USA down under 3.5% of GDP but I’d love some better sources on that.
i was mentioning the 62billion out of the 900billion/year. its seems very small if you think about how many service members(enlisted and officers) + thier families.
Well that was the thing, they say defence contractors, but some of it goes to pensioins and healthcare.
2020-2024 over half of the military budget went to contractors. 54%.
https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/profits-war-top-beneficiaries-pentagon-spending-2020-2024
Sources, nice!
So 46% can go to pensions or anything else.
Who knows how much of that money is completely wasted. Remember pizzas for $500 USD, or whatever the exact price was?
Depends on how you define “necessary”.
More than actual use, the American military is about “implied threat”
“Do as we say, or else”.
Its always been that way. Without the implied threat, the other world leaders would have told cheetolini to pound sand on day one.
And it virtually only ever goes up. More and more of our labor is going towards feeding the imperial war machine, while social services are gutted. Our corrupt politicians just want to line the pockets of the corporations that make bombs, and they start conflicts around the globe to justify it. The primary function of the military is essentially money laundering, to channel public funds into private hands.
