886,000 Million dollar military budget

Peace.

 

The argument on defense spending should be less about money and more about what are needs and obligations are. We've not had that conversation in my lifetime, only the money argument. After the end of the Cold War and the successful Gulf War we decided to have a drawdown in order to get a "Peace Dividend." So we shrunk units, and kicked people out of the service, eliminated various bases and posts across the country and kicked back to enjoy the end of history.

That was dumb.

The discussion we should have been having is about what are our needs and obligations, because if you noticed, we didn't pull out of a single treaty, or reduce our military commitment to any nation. We went through the entire GWOT not trying to build up our military and as a consequence struggled to fight two wars at once, Afghanistan and Iraq; a task we could have handled easily with the size of our ground forces in 1991.

So talking about dollars isn't a serious discussion. First, if you think we need to build up our military the first point to discuss isn't dollars, it's size and manpower. How many new or reconstituted units are you going to add, how many ships? How many aircraft? How many troops? Considering our multiyear failure at recruiting, how big a draft are you going to support? Because you are not going to fill those positions without one.

 

September used to be a great month to go TDY. Money that was not available all year suddenly showed up to send us...somewhere. I remember one year they invented an entire "training course" to make sure we spent all of our training funds by the end of the fiscal year.

As a man who has benefited by quite a few boondoggles, I get it!

 

Fake news. The OP never claimed that it was the biggest as percentage of GDP, you didn't read the OP very well.

Annualized ACTUAL expenditures for Q3/2023 is $1,008.752B, the largest ever.

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal Government: National Defense Consumption Expenditures and Gross Investment [FDEFX], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FDEFX, December 17, 2023.

I'd cut the Defense budget by 10% a year until the DOD successfully passes an audit, obviously they are currently getting more funding than they can track.

https://www.defensenews.com › pentagon › 2023 › 11 › 16 › pentagon-fails-sixth-audit-with-number-of-passing-grades-stagnant
Pentagon fails sixth audit, with number of passing grades stagnant
'Nov 16, 2023WASHINGTON — For the sixth year in a row, the Pentagon failed its annual audit..'

 

Go back to your rocking chair, and relax.

I’ll repeat what I said;

“Bigger than ever in current/nominal dollars, however, as percentage of GDP, the OP didn’t do his homework”

MEANING; As a percentage of GDP, 2024’s Base Defense Budget IS NOT bigger than ever.

 

But your claim is fake news. He never claimed that it was the largest expenditure as a percentage of GDP, he simply state it as the largest, period. Do try to read what is actually posted rather than twisting it into something else so that you can declare it deficient.

Further, clearly we are providing more funds than DOD can handle responsibly, as they have failed six annual audits in a row. I'd reduce their budget by 10% a year until they can pass an audit.

 

But what we pay in taxes for defense is not calculated as a percentage of GDP. It's in real dollars out of our pockets.

 

It's called a 'defense budget'.

Consider defense, how do we defend Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast, ditto the Atlantic Coast.
Maybe we should monitor the Northern border better, but
crucial to defending the US is to control the Southern Border.

Now decide what we need to do that and how much it will cost.

Then ask what needs to be done and can realistically be done for shipping lanes.

Are we willing to risk the solvency of the entire country for overseas military adventures?

I'm suggesting we might be spending more than we should be spending and asking why
the budget is so big?

And the obvious question of whether we are spending so much as to ruin
the thing we want to protect?

and what we are actually achieving and the risks we are taking.

 

The military budget might be better justified if greater use could be made of it.
In the days of discussing 'Build Back Better' I mentioned that the Army Corps
of Engineers had built the flood protection in the town I was in, many years
ago and I thought there was a real possibility they would do a better job for
with less waste than handing the job to big Democrat party donors and their
friends, or whatever ended up happening.

In the Democrat-run town I'm in now some shelters for the homeless were
put for a cost of three times what all the components and labor came to in
total. I'm not saying it proves that will happen with BBB but just that it can
happen.

 

As a percentage of GDP

And/or

REAL (2017 Chained dollars)

NOT BIGGER THAN EVER!

 

He never claimed it was bigger than ever in 2017 chained dollars, or as a percentage of GDP. You are disputing a point that no one made. Do you have any interests in engaging the questions that were raised in the OP?

 

Preparation

1. We have severally depleted our own munition resources because of DC idiocy thinking Ukraine will defeat Russia. All we have done is extend the inevitable. When it comes down to actual numbers, Russia has Air & Sea superiority which will never change, and Ukraine doesn't have enough bodies. Its now just a matter of attrition while the US pours 120 billion into the hole trying to fend off 800,000 trained Russian soldiers. Its the greatest I Told You So ending of the century,

2. Now we are supplying forces in Israel and its only a matter of time before Iran gets in the mix costing us even more depletion of our munition resources.

3. And the number one reason you are seeing much higher spending over all of this (as if it wasn't enough) the US is gearing up to defend Taiwan. That isn't a guarantee we will be forced into it, but we have to prepare for it.

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would destroy world trade, and distance would offer no protection to the inevitable catastrophic blow to the global economy.

About half of the world’s container ships pass through these vital waters [the Taiwan Strait] every year, laden with goods bound for all corners of the world. Taiwan is a crucial link in global supply chains, particularly for advanced semi-conductors.

The world is a very very unstable place right now.

 

Your average per Non-farm employed (162 million) is right, however, Non-farm excludes at least 40 million employed.

There are other measurements, such as “Per Capita”

 

Wait, so they're Reaganites now!(actually, I do think neoconservatism was born with Reagan as Bush SR was his VP, so that's fitting). Well, to quote Obama: "The 1980's called, and they want their foreign policy back"

And the situation in terms of debt-to-GDP is a thousand times worse than during the space wars program. We are well and truly ****ed with these politicians.

 

He claimed it was bigger than ever, Period!

And to you, that’s “a fait extraordinaire”, however, not to me as I don’t promote record highs in current dollars.

 

Massive military spending is an old US tradition. Lets not pretend its anting new.

National debt tripled when Reagan was in office, so there is that.

 

Less than twenty percent of the total budget as envisioned by Bribed Joe and his cronies and one of the few parts that is actually constitutional.

 

And tax receipts more than doubled.

 

Well, if debt triples, when clearly the budget was nowhere near to being balanced. Reagan himself said it was "greatest disappointment" of his presidency.

Did revenues double?

Federal individual income tax revenues fell from 8.7% of GDP in 1980 to a trough of 7.5% of GDP in 1984, then rose to 7.8% of GDP in 1988.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaga...al revenues averaged 17.7,7.8% of GDP in 1988.

Budget deficits

 

Lying with percentages doesn't cut it Revenues in actual dollars climbed from roughly 460billion in 1980 to just over a trillion in 1988. From 1994 onward Gingrich and the Republicans controlled the senate and the house.

 

That's how the federal budget works and how every agency and department works. Yes, it sucks big time. In my former agency, we had "training" and shifted some money allocated from one thing to the training to make the final numbers match. But we do this. That training was a 2 week shooting exercise with live bullets on the top of the Sante Fe Building's upper floors that we used from time to time, rats and all.

 

Accusing posters of lying is an easy and effective way to end the conversation.

Total revenue when he took office $599.3 billion
Total revenue when he left $909.2 billion
Total revenue when Clinton left $2.03 trillion

Have a nice day.

 

And Clinton had a Republican congress from 1995 on Reagan Democrat house and a Bob Dole Senate. You know Bob Dole the guy Gingrich once truthfully referred to as the Tax collector for the Great Society.