Defense Spending Rant

I have been remiss in initiating my ranting so I thought I would begin with a 2011 Facebook rant of mine that I think is still germane.  Despite Trump’s desire to get our NATO allies to pony up more money for common defense, he also wants to increase the US Defense spending by 100 billion dollars.  So forgive me for thinking that he has no desire to recoup defense dollars for more humble projects, like the the education of our children – that is another rant which I also posted on Facebook in 2011 and will try to update.  I will attempt to update this rant, but for the moment this is what I posted nearly 6 years ago.

I generated this analysis based on 2009 data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and there’s scant reason to think it has changed since then. In 2009 the total spent on defense by the US and allies* totaled 1.19 trillion dollars. However the contribution by country was far from equal. The US spent 4.7% of its GDP on defense. While surpassed by Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Oman and Iraq, the other 39 countries spent under 2%. Had the US and each country spent 2.91% of their respective GDPs, the grand total, from all countries, would have still amounted to 1.19 trillion, no overall decrease in the allies defense spending. But it would have led to a decrease of 255 billion in the US spending, and an increase of 175 billion coming from Japan, Germany, and Italy, countries with a large US military presence.
This is not to say that they necessarily spend less than they ought; but that we spend far more than we should, and we are heavily subsidizing the defense of these countries. 

* I used allies because, with these countries, one assumes defense is a shared enterprise. Determining who are America’s allies can be subjective. The graph includes countries in NATO, and those with which we have defense agreements. Plus if our troops are stationed in a country I will call it an ally because it benefits from our activity (perhaps dubious benefit). Thus Iraq, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia are “allies.” However debatable “allies” turn out to have a negligible impact in this analysis.