How Our Trillion-Dollar Defense Empire Is the Cause of Our 'Deficit Problem'

"... we also currently have one of the lowest tax burdens -- In 2008, we ranked 26th out of the 30 OECD countries in that category."

We could make the budget deficit disappear and fully fund Social Security and Medicare without raising taxes, if we only outspend our biggest military rival by threefold.

Joshua Holland
AlterNet
December 8, 2010

The United States spends more on its military and security services than the rest of the world combined, yet in the midst of a major debate over our fiscal situation, that enormous drain on our national treasure isn't really "on the table" in any serious way. Obama's deficit commission recommended cutting the Pentagon's purse, but the thrust of its focus was on veterans' pensions and health-care -- rather than, say, maintaining costly bases to defend such imperiled allies as Italy and Germany -- and the spending reductions were largely symbolic relative to the level of bloat that plagues our security budget.

One often hears that, in very rough terms, about a fifth of the federal budget goes to national security, another fifth pays for Social Security, a fifth or so is spent on Medicare and Medicaid and everything else makes up about 40 percent. But that, like much of the discussion of "defense" spending, is misleading -- it only counts dollars allocated in the annual defense budget, and in “emergency” supplemental bills.

That belies the reality that spending on the American security state is dispersed throughout the federal budget. So while next year’s defense spending, narrowly defined, is expected to come in at $711 billion, when you include all the extra dollars hidden away in other parts of the budget, that number will rise to as high as $1.45 trillion. That would represent around 40 percent of next year’s budget.

(More here.)