El Presidente In 2012?

[Rudyard K]

Originally Posted by ..

if you look closer into the budget you'll find that actually more money is spent.

And likewise, if you look closer into the defense budget, you'll find money spent that aint for defense.

[Texas Contrarian]

Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight

Put about as simply as I can, we could have ended the wars and slashed defense spending radically so that we had a military budget/GDP ratio equal to that of France, and we'd still be running a trillion dollar deficit.

Originally Posted by ..

Well, the US currently spends AFAIK over 4% of their GDP [0]. France spends roughly 2%...

Although you may have done so inadvertently, you just made my point. If the U.S. cut defense spending by 2% of GDP (about $280 billion) the current deficit of about $1.5 trillion would still be well north of a trillion.

Actually, I think the U.S. may spend as much as 6% of GDP (including supplementals for the wars) while France spends something like 2.5%. If that's more or less accurate, it means that if we slashed defense spending to French levels (as a percentage of GDP) the deficit would still be about $1 trillion.

Another way of looking at this issue is to note that U.S. military spending fell all the way to about 3% of GDP in the late '90s after the post-Cold War wind-down. That implies that if we had maintained the military budget at that level, and if the Iraq and Afghan wars had not occurred, annual defense spending would be about $400 billion less than it is today.

As I noted earlier, total annual federal spending (in inflation adjusted numbers) has increased by about $1.4 trillion over the last ten years. About $400 billion is military spending.

The last decade's increase in non-military spending is about $1 trillion, and that's in inflation-adjusted terms. That's obviously the main reason we're in such a deep fiscal hole.

[TexTushHog]

Cost of Obama Stimulus package is $790M if the take the entire thing.

Direct U.S. costs of wars in Iran and Afghanistan are $1.05T and rising, with no end in sight in either place.

Sorry, you're off by over $200M.

http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home

And that estimate doesn't include increases in the Pentagon budget to replace worn out equipment, etc. that will have to be passed in the future or that may have been smuggled into the main DoD budget in the past. Nor does it include the huge external costs of lost arms, legs, divorces, lost of future earning capacity for wounded or psychologically disturbed veterans, etc. Not to mention the external costs to Iraq or Afghanistan.

[..]

Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight

About $400 billion is military spending.

as i said previously, "if you look closer into the budget you'll find that actually more money is spent."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militar...kdown_for_2011

http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941

[Rudyard K]

I really don’t understand all this talk about Defense costs. I cannot imagine, no matter what our world status, that the US would have zero defense cost. Somewhere, somehow, somewhat…we, as a nation, must spend some money on defense.

Do we need to maintain any navy? Do we need to maintain any armed forces? What about an air force?...our own WMDs?…port and bases?...weaponry?...etc. If we need to maintain law enforcement personnel and materials in each and every city across our nation, why then is it perceived we don’t need the same protections from those not of our nation?

Since the beginning of the US, the US has been involved in some kind of significant armed conflict 20% of the time we have been in existence. Yep, for some 230 years, the US has been in some kind of significant armed conflict (as opposed to a “war”, which generally must be declared by congress), with other nations, a little less often than one and one-half days a week….each and every week. Were some of those conflicts brought upon by ourselves? Most likely, Yes. What is hard to ascertain, is how many conflicts were not needed because another nation thought better of tugging on Superman’s cape.

But all this discussion about defense % of GDP, WTF’s comments about the “war machine”, etc. is lunacy. No matter what we do, I can’t imagine that there would be no defense costs. So, the question is not, “What % of US budget is spent on defense”? The question really should be, “What are we trying to accomplish”? We can spend a lot less on defense if all we care about doing is defending ourselves against outsiders. But that is a very isolationist view. Frankly, I am quite a bit more isolationist in my views than I think many others are. I’d rather 100% of the goods and services that US citizens use in their everyday life to be produced right here in the US. But, such a system would, in many cases (maybe most cases) mean that the costs of those goods and services would be higher to each US citizen. The more dependent we are on goods and services from other nations…the more need there is for defense of our ability to obtain those other nations goods and services. Less dependency…less need for defense.

We have chosen to be more global and access good and services for our citizens from other nations at a lower coats than we prod. That is fine. But it is foolish to think that such a thought process will not result in a higher need for defense. So, debate all you want about whether this conflict or that conflict was a wise move in the defense of our nation…argue whether we need ten guns or missiles for every one of anyone else’s. But % of GDP on defense as a discussion point lacks any semblance of credibility.

[Texas Contrarian]

TTH and double-dot, I'm not sure what point you guys are trying to make.

If it's that we spend way too much on the defense budget, and that that's becoming increasingly unaffordable, I'm with you there. But if it's that the increased military spending of the last 9 years is the main cause of our looming fiscal crisis; sorry, that argument simply falls flat on its face.

Originally Posted by TexTushHog

Cost of Obama Stimulus package is $790M if the take the entire thing.

Direct U.S. costs of wars in Iran and Afghanistan are $1.05T and rising, with no end in sight in either place.

Sorry, you're off by over $200M [sic].

Actually, the Obama "stimulus" package is $862 billion, if you "take the entire thing." But what's a piddling little $72 billion among friends? (Especially when government is flushing money down the toilet in $100 billion bundles!)

But before suggesting that someone is "off by over $200 billion", why not actually look at what he said?

Such as:

Originally Posted by CaptainMidnight

..all the payoffs to favored constituencies, entitlement expansions, and pork-festooned "stimulus" packages.

That includes not just the wasted $862 billion "stimulus" package, but all kinds of entitlement expansions and other politically-motivated stuff (such as the expensive and unpaid for Medicare prescription drug benefit plan of 2003, porked-up agriculture and transportation bills, and all kinds of other patronage spending -- way too many things to list). You can't increase non-military spending by an annual rate of about $1 trillion without a big list of such stuff.

Originally Posted by ..

as i said previously, "if you look closer into the budget you'll find that actually more money is spent."

And if you actually do look closely, you will see that you are not making an apples-to-apples comparison, at least as regards increases in military spending over the last decade. (Which is what we're talking about, since the issue is that some of you guys only point to military spending whenever the federal budget is mentioned, and seem eager to deflect attention from much larger increases in other spending.)

For instance, take a look at the $206.7 billion (noted in the Higgs article) for net interest attributable to past debt-financed defense outlays. That's a very big number -- and as I'm sure you realize, relates to spending from long ago: Largely Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. (We never paid off the national debt; we just reduced it as a percentage of GDP after WWII.) Also consider that spending on Veterans Affairs ($69.8 billion) and for the Military Retirement Fund ($38.5 billion) has existed for a very long time. Those items are there, already baked into the pie.

Such items were not included in the 3% of GDP military budgets of the late '90s. It is important to realize that if you want to make an apples/apples comparison. Therefore, I think my estimate of a 3% of GDP increase (from about 3% to about 6%) more than fairly allows for the supplemental costs of the wars plus all additional defense spending. After all, that's about a $400 billion annual increase. You can spin all you want, but I don't think you're going to be able to make a credible case that military spending has increased by an annual rate of much more than $400 billion in real dollars over the last 10 years.

That leaves an inflation-adjusted $1 trillion increase in the rate of annual non-militarty spending!

And we're on course to run deficits well in excess of that from here to eternity.

Is it any wonder that a growing number of people think we don't have a serious government?

Whoever takes on the task of being "El Presidente" three years from now is likely to have one of the toughest jobs in history!

[TexTushHog]

Someone said that the one year stimulus was bigger than the costs of Bush's two wars. They were wrong.

And the Defense budget is way, way too high. And it is, in part, a reason that we have a deficit. Whether we have a "looming fiscal crisis" is very much up for debate. If we would tax our economic output at the same level as most industrialized nations, we would be fine. We're trying to run a twenty-first century nation on a 19th century budget.

[discreetgent]

Originally Posted by TexTushHog

Someone said that the one year stimulus was bigger than the costs of Bush's two wars. They were wrong.

TTH,

Politically we are often on the same page. I do feel the need to point out that just as Afghanistan is not Obama's war as claimed by Michael Steele it also is not Bush's war. Any President - IMHO - would have gone into Afghanistan. What happened later with Iraq and its effect on the war in Afghanistan is a different story. But the US had to go into Afghanistan in 2001.

[..]

discreetgent I value your opinions but I believe the whole War on Terror and esp. the war in Afghanistan was a very big mistake.

IMO it certainly is both Bush's war and Obama's war. Bush started it, despite the warnings from all experts who know the region. (No, it was not just Eric Margolis and Michael Scheuer who warned against it.)

Obama's mistake was to increase the troops in the battlefield, instead of starting to withdraw ASAP. (The very same mistake the Soviets made.)

The outcome of the war of course is devastating, with Taliban and Al-Qaida stronger than ever and the region even more destabilized than before the war.

[charlestudor2005]

Originally Posted by ..

IMO it certainly is both Bush's war and Obama's war. Bush started it, despite the warnings from all experts who know the region.

The outcome of the war of course is devastating, with Taliban and Al-Qaida stronger than ever and the region even more destabilized than before the war.

And the rationale for the "War" was that the US was attacked. However, no country attacked the US. We were attacked by a band of criminals, albeit ones who cited religion as their rationale. To use these criminals as a rationale to wage war not only sends our soldiers into harms way without a correct justification, but also elevates the criminals' status.

Bush acted as if the "war on terror" was a new thing. Actually, criminals who engage in terror have been around since the beginning of time. And, for the most part, organized militaries have had a fairly unsuccessful time quelling them. Especially when they fight extremely unpopular militaries because the "terrorists" get a lot of help from locals. Just look at the Revolutionary War here.

We made a mistake of gigantic proportions launching those wars because they were based on faulty premises. We should have gotten out long ago. The deaths of US sons and daughters will be on the heads of those who launched the "war" and those who continued it.

[WTF]

Originally Posted by discreetgent

TTH,

Politically we are often on the same page. I do feel the need to point out that just as Afghanistan is not Obama's war as claimed by Michael Steele it also is not Bush's war. Any President - IMHO - would have gone into Afghanistan. What happened later with Iraq and its effect on the war in Afghanistan is a different story. But the US had to go into Afghanistan in 2001.

It is almost 2011

[WTF]

Originally Posted by Rudyard K

But all this discussion about defense % of GDP, WTF’s comments about the “war machine”, etc. is lunacy.

No matter what we do, I can’t imagine that there would be no defense costs.

. But % of GDP on defense as a discussion point lacks any semblance of credibility.

No sane person would suggest No Military. But unless you look at what you are spending vs what you are getting in return then you too are insane. Counries are no different than business.

We spend more than the rest of the world combined. That is just crazy. I mean really how much firepower do we need past destrowing the world as we know it 10 times over?

GDP is just a way of getting a handle on what we spnd vs what we produce, funny thing is you will not hear Defense contractors wanting to tie budgets to GDP in times of recession, funny how that works.

[Rudyard K]

Originally Posted by WTF

No sane person would suggest No Military. But unless you look at what you are spending vs what you are getting in return then you too are insane. Counries are no different than business.

We spend more than the rest of the world combined. That is just crazy. I mean really how much firepower do we need past destrowing the world as we know it 10 times over?

GDP is just a way of getting a handle on what we spnd vs what we produce, funny thing is you will not hear Defense contractors wanting to tie budgets to GDP in times of recession, funny how that works.

I guess it has some worthiness of mention, but it is a pretty low factor to me. There is no way to measure the real return (what you're getting) versus spending. One needs to talk about the threats (real or percieved) and what we need to do to alleviate (i.e. protect Americans) those threats. Is it good enough that we are only safe in America? Maybe so. But that is a question that needs asking. Frankly, other than Pearl Harbor and 9-11, all of the battles have been fought on foreign soil (well, other than our own internal war of northern aggression). Is that a measurable benefit? Its hard to quantify, but it is a real benefit to me.

I don't disagree that we probably don't need 10 bullets for every villan. But I we do have two major shorelines and two seperate land connections in the US...and it wasn't all that long ago we were fighting a war in two different theaters at the same time.

There is just a lot more to it than % of GDP. I'd spend 90% of my personal GDP to protect my family if the threat was real and imminent. Frankly, I think so would you. So, it is more important to discuss what you are trying to accomplish...than % of GDP.

Running around talking as a major topic about % of GDP related to defense is like running around talking about how much we spent on our pick-up related to ranching.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Chinese carrier killer. And you know it's only aimed at the U.S.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...,4739781.story

[Texas Contrarian]

Originally Posted by TexTushHog

Someone said that the one year stimulus was bigger than the costs of Bush's two wars. They were wrong.

Perhaps someone said that, but I did not. That's why I took exception to your earlier statement that I was "off by over $200 billion." You obviously did not pay any attention at all to what I actually posted.

My essential point was that non-military spending, on an inflation-adjusted basis, has increased by about $1 trillion over the last 9 years. That accounts for about 70% of the total spending increases over the last decade.

Obama's "stimulus" package is only part of that. What people sometimes forget is that non-military spending increased at a faster rate under George W. Bush than under any of his recent predecessors -- and that even includes LBJ and the Great Society era! Yet Obama, although he continually complains (justifiably) that he inherited a very serious problem, seems intent on adding to it at a staggering rate.

Originally Posted by TexTushHog

Whether we have a "looming fiscal crisis" is very much up for debate.

If policymakers fail to make some very tough choices sooner rather than later, I don't see how we can avoid a very serious crisis. Perhaps you think it's perfectly OK to run deficits nearing 10% of GDP year after year and just hope for the best. Many nations have actually tried to get away with that, but history is quite clear: It never ends well.

Originally Posted by TexTushHog

If we would tax our economic output at the same level as most industrialized nations, we would be fine.

The way we're spending, that's exactly what we're going to have to do. But that means imposing a VAT. Although the situation could change, most people seem to consider that idea politically toxic. In fact, the senate recently took one of those non-binding "sense of the senate" votes on the acceptability of a VAT. All but about 15 senators nixed any consideration of the idea.

If you think voter sentiment against this expensive, overarching agenda is growing now, just wait and see what happens if politicians start seriously talking about a VAT.