Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Anyone want some Butter?



Now lets look at this:

Rank ↓ ↓Country ↓Military expenditures (USD) ↓Date of information ↓
World Total1,470,000,000,0002008[2]
NATO Total1,049,875,309,000[citation needed]
1Flag of the United StatesUnited States651,163,000,0002009[3][4]
Flag of EuropeEuropean Union Total312,259,000,0002008-2009
2Flag of the People's Republic of ChinaPeople's Republic of China70,132,100,0002009[5]
3Flag of FranceFrance68,135,700,0002008-2009[6]
4Flag of the United KingdomUnited Kingdom63,479,100,000FY 2009-10[7]
5Flag of JapanJapan48,860,000,0002008[8]
6Flag of GermanyGermany45,930,000,0002008[9]
7Flag of ItalyItaly40,050,000,0002008[10]
8Flag of RussiaRussian Federation39,600,000,0002009[11]
9Flag of IndiaIndia32,700,000,0002009-2010[12]
10Flag of Saudi ArabiaSaudi Arabia31,050,000,0002008[13]

Anyone think we need more butter and less guns? We spend nearly 10x that of our closest competitor, China. Maybe if we only spent three times as much as them, we could close out budget gap.

What does everyone else think about this?

2 comments:

Bryant said...

"What does everyone else think about this?" -- Yes, it's too high. It should be $0.

No, I'm not joking.

But in the mean time, I'd support any effort to reduce it by a reasonably large amount.

Harrison said...

Yeah, it's just silly. Our "Defense" spending is pretty ridiculous, and that is even before we take into account the moral implications of military interventions, invasions, regime changes, imperialism etc abroad.

One of things that is bothering me about Obama is that while hes is preaching increasing our domestic spending, he shows now intentions of decreasing our military spending by any meaningful amount. Like Bush, it seems hes just going to grow the government in both directions.