Heritage In Focus: Myths About Defense Spending: Part 1

Heritage In Focus: Myths About Defense Spending: Part 1

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Heritage
• Foundation
• Focus
• Defense
• Spending
• National
• Budget
• GDP
• Carafano
• Eaglen

[PissedFechtmeister]

What's the point of comparing defence spending to GDP? Oh yeah, it's to make it look like a small amount. I'd like to know how much we spend defending other countries compared to how much we spend on protecting our own borders.

[investortownhall]

Propaganda Foundation. We're spending over $700 billion. The two wars & the life time of health care and medical expenses for soliders is never discussed. These people would love to cut your gandparents monthly $875 soc. sec. check to spend billions more on old cold-war Weapons and new wars.

The US spents 10x more than Russia spents and 6x more than China spends And we now call them economic trading partners not ememies.

[investortownhall]

"For 45 years of the Cold War we were in an arms race with the Soviet Union.

Now it appears we're in an arms race with ourselves." retired Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr., U.S. Navy.

Defense? What a joke. Iraq did attack us. War mongers invented the WMS BS to get more taxpayer money. 50% of the USAs discretionary budget is spent on the military while Education & Soc Services gets 10% & Health gets 6%.

[ReconTeam111]

@UsualMike

Wrong, defense spending should be kept at a level % of the GDP in order to ensure the creeping growth of entitlement programs doesn't suck up funds that should be going to the military. We need new equipment, and we shouldn't put the status of social security for example over national defense.

Defense spending as a % of the budget is typically used as a dishonest figure to justify cuts the left wants to make.

[ReconTeam111]

@Trisket

They cut the production run from a "minimum" of 380+ to only 187. Back in the 1980s when the program first began, there were plans to buy some 910 ATFs. With the end of the Cold War this was scaled back to 648, and while it was understandable to make some cuts with the fall of the USSR, we should not have kept cutting numbers.

If the F-22 has prevented enemy air forces from challenging the United States military, they have also done their job.

[Trisket]

They didn't cut the F-22, there are 145 in service and they cost 142 million a piece they aren't just going to send them to the junk yard for scrap, they just canceled a single production plan for more. Air superiority is pointless when your enemy has no aircraft to begin with.

[lookslikepat]

Well said.

AND look at how much bigger the GDP is now compared to then.

And just the idea of comparing WW2 to Iraq as the same kind of "wars", that's a BIG wtf

[lookslikepat]

"Wars aren't that expensive you know". Wait, so your message is that this makes them valid?

Looney-tunes...

[UsualMike]

No myth is actually debunked here. Perhaps these intellectual lightweights should explain why the level of defense spending should be related to GDP. Like other programs, defense's share of GDP should be declining over time, but it is not. It is sucking up ever more resources year after year. Are we really getting any more defense for our tax dollar? A more useful measure would be to express defense spending as a percent of the budget.

[ReconTeam111]

Our military spending should not have been cut after the Cold War. The world is more unstable than ever and yet we have idiotic politicians cutting key programs like the F-22 because they think they are "too costly" while we waste billions on wasteful social projects. The military must have a major modernization and not reduce it's force size any further. We need more aircraft, new ground vehicles, new guns, and new ships! Today!