US military spending and entitlements
Steve Broback just wrote an interesting post about the US budget, and why we’re in a really bad spot that’s unlikely to be fixable.
Just because my brain doesn’t work in GDP percentages, I did a little number crunching to try and understand why it makes sense to complain about military spending if it’s really that insignificant.
According to the report from the CBO that Broback links to, entitlement spending is about 5% of GDP right now. US GDP is about 14.5 trillion, which means spending is about 725 billion.
According to this report from the CBO in January 2010:
Military spending is expecting to be $573 billion annually through 2028 (in 2010 dollars).
So, if you don’t mind fudging $200 billion in the scheme of 14.5 trillion, the actual spending on each segment is about the same. I’d love to see your chart above with the military spending split out (this is what I initially started searching for).
I have some vague recollection that GWB removed military spending from the budget so that it wouldn’t be included in charts like the one above, but that could be total BS. Couldn’t find a link to support it.
Regardless, the point does stand that entitlement spending is on a growth track, and are politically hard/impossible to halt, which presents a big dilemma. What we need, you might argue, are politicians that don’t want to be re-elected. But of course being in office for a while is the only way you earn the political currency to Get Things Done.