Raw data and sources
| 2012 (in billions of dollars) | 2012 percent of federal funds budget | |
|---|
Source: Where Do Our Income Tax Dollars Go? , Friends Committee on National Legislation, February 2013. Note, due to rounding, totals and percentages may not add up. Current military spending includes Pentagon budget, nuclear weapons and military-related programs throughout the budget.
| | |
| Current Military Spending | 806 | 27% |
| Interest on Pentagon Debt | 188 | 6% |
| Costs of past wars | 129 | 4% |
| Total military percent | 1,123 | 37% |
| Health care | 558 | 19% |
| Responses to Poverty | 452 | 15% |
| Interest on Public Debt | 263 | 9% |
| Supporting the Economy | 241 | 8% |
| Federal Government Operations | 258 | 8% |
| Energy, Science, & Environment | 81 | 3% |
| Diplomacy, Development and War Prevention | 45 | 2% |
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Furthermore, “national defense” category of federal spending is typically just over half of the United States discretionary budget (the money the President/Administration and Congress have direct control over, and must decide and act to spend each year. This is different to mandatory spending, the money that is spent in compliance with existing laws, such as social security benefits, medicare, paying the interest on the national debt and so on). For recent years here is how military, education and health budgets (the top 3) have fared:
Discretionary budgets in $ (billions) and percentages
| Year | Total ($) | Defense ($) | Defense (%) | Education ($) | Education (%) | Health ($) | Health (%) |
|---|
Sources and notes
- The link for each year takes you to that year’s source
- The defense budget is only the Pentagon request each Fiscal Year. It does not include nuclear weapons programs from the Department of Energy, or funding for wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
| | | | | | | |
| 2009 | 997 | 541 | 54 | 61.9 | 6.2 | 52.7 | 5.3 |
| 2008 | 930 | 481.4 | 51.8 | 58.6 | 6.3 | 52.3 | 5.6 |
| 2007 | 873 | 460 | 52.7 | 56.8 | 6.5 | 53.1 | 6.1 |
| 2006 | 840.5 | 438.8 | 52 | 58.4 | 6.9 | 51 | 6.1 |
| 2005 | 820 | 421 | 51 | 60 | 7 | 51 | 6.2 |
| 2004 | 782 | 399 | 51 | 55 | 7 | 49 | 6.3 |
| 2003 | 767 | 396 | 51.6 | 52 | 6.8 | 49 | 6.4 |
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For those hoping the world can decrease its military spending, SIPRI warns that “while the invasion [of Iraq] may have served as warning to other states with weapons of mass destruction, it could have the reverse effect in that
some states may see an increase in arsenals as the only way to prevent a forced regime change.”
In this new era,
traditional military threats to the USA are fairly remote. All of their enemies, former
enemies and even allies do not pose a military threat to the United States. For a while now, critics of large military spending have pointed out that most likely forms of threat to the United States would be through terrorist actions, rather than conventional warfare, and that the spending is still geared towards Cold War-type scenarios and other such conventional confrontations.
[T]he lion’s share of this money is not spent by the Pentagon on protecting American citizens. It goes to supporting U.S. military activities, including interventions, throughout the world. Were this budget and the organization it finances called the “Military Department,” then attitudes might be quite different. Americans are willing to pay for defense, but they would probably be much less willing to spend billions of dollars if the money were labeled “Foreign Military Operations.”
—
The Billions For “Defense” Jeopardize Our Safety, Center For Defense Information, March 9, 2000
And, of course, this will come from American tax payer money. Many studies and polls show that
military spending is one of the last things on the minds of American people.
But it is not just the U.S. military spending. In fact, as Jan Oberg
argues, western militarism often overlaps with civilian functions affecting attitudes to militarism in general. As a result, when revelations come out that some Western militaries may have trained dictators and human rights violators, the justification given may be surprising, which we look at in the next page.
This is fun keep it going.
