The first in a series detailing, in decreasing order of importance, what I feel needs to be done to move America back to the progressive ideal. Cross-posted from Brad's Brain
For fiscal year 2007 the United States is spending $439.3 billion dollars (pdf) on the military, specifically the department of defense. Doesn't sound like much, does it? But this figure's a little misleading. First we need to factor in what is being spent in Iraq, which for some reason doesn't get included in the "military spending" figures. It's supposed to be around $110 billion, but some say it will be higher. Still we're not there. The CIA and various other "defense" operations are unconstitutionally protected from disclosing budgetary figures. They are all funded from what's called the "black budget," and it's estimated at around $1.1 trillion a year, a complicated number because it's not merely subtracting known expenditures from total revenues. (Read the report for more details on this.) So all told we spend around $1.6 trillion dollars a year on our military apparatus. It's long been known that we spend more on the military than all other nations combined, but that's without the black budget. With that factored in, we hold a 3:1 advantage.
