Defense Budgets

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How to Measure Defense Spending?

“Defense spending at lowest levels in 60 years”:


In fact, Pentagon spending in real, inflation-adjusted dollars has roughly doubled since 2000 and is up about 50 percent since 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War.

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Defense Spending

My thoughts: Is cutting $500 billion over 10 years really that tough?

Department of Defense

This 129 page report cost $38,000.

My thoughts: Bloated budget?

Don't Worry About Defense Cuts

The United States could substantially cut its defense budget and still spend more money on our military than every country that even plausibly threatens us combined. Can someone explain why that isn't enough?

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Defense Spending

Why Can't Defense Spending Be Cut?

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Measuring Defense Spending

The other false target of Democratic outrage is defense spending, which Mr. Bush proposes to lift in fiscal 2009 to $585 billion. The left is decrying this as the most defense spending, in inflation-adjusted terms, since World War II. But using the more appropriate comparison of spending as a share of the economy, Mr. Bush's request would bring defense outlays to 4.5% of GDP next year, up from 4.2% this year.

That is on par with the 4.4% of GDP in President Clinton's first year in office, and remains well below the 6.2% of GDP in 1986 at the peak of the Reagan defense buildup. (See the nearby chart.) With a hot war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the terrorist threat hardly ebbing, the U.S. should be spending even more on defense. Democrats need to explain why they want record subsidies for gentleman farmers to take priority over national security.

from the WSJ

If we were inclined to borrow a phrase from Ronald Reagan, we might reproach the Pentagon bigwigs by saying, "Well, there you go again." This year, as in virtually every year for the past fifty years, the military chiefs are trying to minimize the enormousness of their proposed baseline budget ($515.4 billion) by dividing it by the amount of the concurrent gross domestic product (GDP)...

Want to make this year's gigantic Pentagon proposal look small? All you need to do is to divide it by this year's GDP and then compare the resulting ratio to the ratio that obtained during the Korean War (13–14 percent) or the Vietnam War (7–9 percent). To make this year's spending appear almost tiny, dredge up the ratio for the fully mobilized years of World War II (37–38 percent)...

A far more reasonable price, however, would be one arrived at completely independent of its relation to GDP. Recall that the GDP purports to be the value at market prices of all currently produced final goods and services the U.S. economy brings forth in a year. It includes everything from hamburgers to computer software to H-bombs. Why, we might ask, should military spending bear any particular proportion to this figure?

Robert Higgs

There is no magic ratio. Real threats should be addressed. 30% would likely have been too low for WWII, 4% might be too high during peacetime.

Guns and Butter

In fact, the U.S. is spending relatively little on defense by historic wartime standards, and that's including the $192 billion in 2007 to fund the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's true that overall defense spending, in dollars adjusted for inflation, is higher than it was during the 1990s. And thank heaven for that. Defense spending as a share of the economy in the Clinton years dipped to its lowest level since 1940, as we lived under the illusion of a "peace dividend" while al Qaeda was gaining strength.

read the entire WSJ article

There basic argument is that a war surtax is not needed.