Quote:
Originally Posted by JD Barleycorn
. As for the defense budget; the defense budget for 2012 is only 3.2 percent of GDP. Under Reagan it was 6.2 percent. The last Bush budget it was 5 percent. It is decreasing while we are still at war! did.
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JD, you are like a little kid that wants a horse. All you take into account is what the horse costs to buy. You do not take into account any related cost to owning a horse. Buying more land , food and any interest cost you have incured!
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2143
If the national economy produces more hamburgers and computer software next year, these economic developments in no way imply that more money should then be spent for defense. If the threats remain the same and the costs of acquiring defense goods and services remain the same, then the defense budget can remain fixed in amount and still serve its proper purpose. Notice, however, that if the GDP continues to grow, this adequate, fixed-amount, military budget will constitute a smaller fraction of GDP...
...It is long past time for the media and the American people to stop being taken in by shopworn rhetorical trickery such as that attending the ritual discussion of defense spending relative to GDP. Its only real purpose is to minimize the magnitude of a defense budget that has swollen to absurdly gigantic proportions. Why can’t the Department of Defense today defend the country for a smaller annual amount than it needed to defend the country during the Cold War, when we faced an enemy with large, modern armed forces and thousands of accurate, nuclear-armed ICBMs?
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS
Excluded are civil defense and current expenditures for previous military activities, such as for veterans' benefits, demobilization, conversion, and destruction of weapons.
Do you understand that the military does not count servicing the debt they run up as an expendeture!
http://www.politifact.com/virginia/s...red-against-g/
But Winslow Wheeler, director of the Strauss Military Project at the Center for Defense Information, argued GDP is an unreliable measure of the amount that the U.S. spends on defense.
After all, GDP is constantly changing, he said. Even if the defense budget is on the rise, it could become a smaller percent of the nation’s overall economic output if GDP increases at a faster pace.
Forbes "is engaging in that sliding slippery scale," said Wheeler, whose group was founded by retired military officers to analyze defense issues. "He’s trying to make the defense budget look small. It’s not."
Wheeler also noted that the base budget that Forbes cites only accounts for Department of Defense spending and doesn’t include other military-related costs, such as money spent every year by the Department of Energy to maintain the country’s nuclear stockpile.
Even when adjusted for inflation, the total dollars dedicated to national defense is now at its highest level since World War II, Wheeler said.
Figures from the Department of Defense comptroller’s office show that, when measured in 2005 dollars, the total spending on national defense peaked at just more than $900 billion in 1945 before falling off. It didn’t approach the $700 billion mark until the 2011 fiscal year.
The Center for Strategic & International Studies report also notes that the U.S., by far, spends more money on defense than any other country in the world.
The U.S. accounted for 46.5 percent of global military spending in 2009, according to the CSIS report. China only accounted for 6.6 percent with France in third at 4.2 percent.
That's rich. Don Rickles here can't stand the way people talk about him. 
