I heard during the last election that we spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined. I was stunned. I googled it. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, it’s roughly true. I did the arithmetic on their statistics and found that it took the military spending for the next 9 countries to equal that of the U.S. in 2013.
I’m still stunned.
Then I wonder what that means in economic terms. Is that sort of spending a drain on our economy? If we didn’t have to spend that money on defense, does that mean we could have spent that money on directly improving the lives of our citizens instead? Is that how it works for countries that don’t have world-wide military forces? Do they have an economy and standard of living an order of magnitude better than ours?
I don’t think so.
Or is it more complicated than that? Is “national defense” actually an economic engine? Is there a net gain to our country by all that churning of money; taxing citizens, buying munitions, employing armies, and deploying them all about? Certainly there are other motivations for our military actions, but since we do it so much, I have to wonder if maybe our economy is better when we’re pumping out war goods than when we’re at peace.
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