Reply #40: To be fair, regarding the chart on military spending, if it were listed as expenditures

[totodeinhere]

as a percentage of gross national product, rather than as a raw figure, it would look much different.

One thing that the chart fails to include is the fact that as a percentage of GNP, US military spending has been on a steady decline the 1960s.

With the U.S. defense budget accounting for over half the military spending on the planet, you'd think that records were being broken. Well, they aren't. As a percentage of GNP, military spending continues a decline that has been going on since the 1960s (when, because of the Vietnam war, defense spending was 10.7 percent of GNP). That went down to 5.9 percent of GNP in the 1970s and, despite a much heralded "defense buildup" in the 1980s, still declined in the 1980s (to 5.8 percent.) With the end of the Cold War, spending dropped sharply again in the 1990s, to 4.1 percent. For the first decade of the 21st century, defense spending is expected to average 3.4 percent of GNP. Most of the current defense budget is being spent on personnel (payroll and benefits), and buying new equipment to replace the Cold War era stuff that is wearing out and to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htproc/articles/20080613.aspx