When your kid has to go to bed hungry.....

[kpete]

Last edited Sat Mar 21, 2015, 12:04 PM - Edit history (1)

[SheilaT]

1. I wonder what a similar pie chart for the spending of other countries would look like.

[kpete]

2. How is this?

[Major Nikon]

3. Kinda like this

[Rex]

4. Well NONE of them have that much money going toward the military.

America has a military that is a big as all the other armies (China actually has more ground troops, but not a single aircraft carrier) in the world and the budget is more than all those budgets combined. It is a joke to pretend America is not a militant nation. We waste most of our money on the military every year.

50 million children starve each night in America yet we have miles and miles of abandoned military planes rotting in the desert. We abandoned billions of dollars of military hardware in Afghanistan.

One day our disposable culture is going to come back and bite us in the ass.

[Igel]

6. Depends.

Do you include all the non-discretionary spending or just the discretionary spending?

Most of the comparisons I've seen only make the distinction for the US. They also ignore other differences that would reduce the salience of their point.

It's less analysis and reasoning and more PR and rhetoric.

We spend a lot more money on the military, for instance. But even that is a funny number, because that includes salaries, medical care, food, schools, etc., as well as R&D funds. Look to another country and their military spending is much, much lower: Their troop salaries are often drastically lower, their medical care comes from the general universal healthcare funding sources, R&D funds aren't military but "R&D" or they reverse engineer a lot of things.

Like I said, less analysis and more rhetoric. The single biggest failing in much of the US today, confusing word and thing.

[SheilaT]

5. Oh, I already know that this country spends

as much as the rest of the world combined on military.

What I want is a breakdown of how Sweden, or China, or Cuba, or France, or, well you get the idea, how other countries allocate their money.