The next 13 nations" is certainly not "all other nations combined"...



Talking about the next 13 nations, Britain, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Australia and Canada (9 out of 13) are part of what I mentioned: the USA is subsidizing their defense by defending them. Really, to calculate defense expenditures in a fair way, you should look at the combined budgets of the US and allies. Those nine countries (and smaller allies in their regions) are spending not what is reported there, but that, plus part of the USA budget. Again, the US spends so much because it defends other countries too!

This in turn not just increases the US military budget in both absolute and proportional terms, but reduces the military budgets of allies in both absolute and proportional terms too; allowing them to spend a greater proportion of their budgets in other things. Such as social programs, which are larger in an Europe that doesn't have to pay for its defense because American suckers do it for them. It is difficult to know exactly how much of the US spending is subsidizing others, but I would gladly assign 50-50 rates to US and foreign subsidy each.

A further difficulty in defense budgets is that the process of appropriations is so dirty. Contracting companies bribe Congress to pass deals by which they gain contracts for new this and new that; without regards to what the Pentagon actually wants or needs. This is a known problem and it bloats the defense budget but it's hard to do anything much about it with the current appropriations process as it is run now.



Come on, *all of* Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIPS, Veterans Assistance, and "Safety Net" (too vague, but I would assume this includes all non medical assistance programs such as food stamps) are social programs, and so is most of education [*]. They may be run from different departments, but they are all social programs. That adds to 63%.

[*] Education is so low because this is the federal budget and most of the public funding for education in the US is from the states.







Cuteness is to die for
Cuteness cannot fail
Cuteness knows no limit
Cuteness will prevail