Safety In Numbers
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Defense: We've been hearing recently about the mammoth military buildup the U.S. is undertaking, part of its supposed goal to be an empire. Look at the numbers, however, and a different reality emerges.
What has been touted by both the right and the left as a "mammoth" buildup is in fact nothing of the sort. What the White House is doing, and rightly, is merely stabilizing spending after nearly a decade of giddy slashing of America's defense budget.
If you really want to measure how much we're spending, the best way to gauge defense expenditures isn't in dollars and cents. It's in how much of our economy it takes up.
Right now, that's not much - and it's expected to get smaller over the next half-decade.
Last year the U.S. spent 3.4% of its total economic output on defense. This year it's higher: 3.5%, or $365 billion. Next year, even after planned growth of 4.2%, spending will again total just 3.4% of total output. And by 2008, it will drop to 3.3%.
How does that compare with America's recent history? At the end of World War II, the U.S. spent a whopping 38% of its GDP on defense. No, that's not a misprint .
In the 1950s Korean War era, we spent 10% of GDP on defense; during the Vietnam War, 7% to 9%.
The figure fell sharply during the 1970s even though the threat was still great; the Soviet Union was in its most virulently expansionist phase.
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should be a graph here.?
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President Reagan reversed course, boosting defense spending to 6.2% of GDP at its mid-1980s peak - half again as much as the late 1970s level.
It was money well spent. The Soviets, in a mad crush to narrow the growing gap between them and the U.S., spent themselves into bankruptcy and collapsed. Communism died of exhaustion.
It was Reagan's much-hated buildup that made the 1990s Cold War builddown possible - and helped create the late 1990s budget surpluses that so many in Washington who opposed the defense buildup tried to claim as their own.
Today, many critics again say the U.S. is spending too much on defense. Why not more on education? Health care? Transportation?
The answer is defense is one of the few things Americans overwhelmingly support. It's at the root of our government's very reason for being: "Provide for the common defence" is cited in the Constitution as a key reason for having any government at all.
Like Reagan, President Bush today faces a massive global threat that requires vigilance, resolve and, yes, more defense spending. Americans will sleep easier knowing that another terrorist atrocity like 9-11 is much less likely, thanks to our enhanced defense presence. If we can do that with the pittance we're now spending, we're a blessed nation indeed.
