...That brings our grand total to an astonishing $931 billion.
And this will turn out to be a conservative figure. We won’t spend less than that, but among other things, it doesn’t include the interest we’re paying on money we borrowed to fund past military operations; nor does it include portions of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that are dedicated to national security. And we don’t know if this number captures the entire intelligence budget or not, because parts of intelligence funding are classified.
For now, however, that whopping $931 billion for fiscal year 2013 will have to do. If our national security budget were its own economy, it would be the 19th largest in the world, roughly the size of Australia’s. Meanwhile, the country with the next largest military budget, China, spends a mere pittance by comparison. The most recent estimate puts China’s military funding at around $136 billion.Read it at Tom Dispatch
War Pay — The Nearly $1 Trillion National Security Budget
By Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer
That's not only a hefty chunk of the budget but also of GDP going to military Keynesianism, not counting all the weaponry that is exported around the world.
What's up with that? Ludo De Brabander and Georges Spriet explain how we got here beginning right after WWII. Recall President Eisenhower warning about the expanding military-industrial complex at the time he left office?
GLOBAL NATO: A Geostrategic Instrument of Worldwide Military Conquest — A Historical Review and Analysis (1949-2012)
by Ludo De Brabander and Georges Spriet
Wars are us. It's an expensive undertaking. Meanwhile we could hire over fifteen million people in a JG for a trillion a year. And we probably wouldn't need only a year. And some of it would come back in taxes and GDP. Or maybe we could fund single payer and forget all the nonsense about SS running out of money. WTF.
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