Do you agree that if the data shows that US military spending as a percentage of GDP has decline faster, then US military exports as a percentage of GDP, that the American military industrial complex is smaller as a percentage of GDP, and that its reasonable to say its a smaller part of the country, esp. if the decline has been large?
If you don't accept that logic, why? If you do then we have the framework, we just have to plug in the data.
I linked to over 60 years worth of data for US military spending as a percentage of GDP. Do you dispute that there has been a major decline? Or do you just argue that the growth of exports could more than make up for it? If the former, then you don't care about the data, your just disputing anything that doesn't agree with your position. If that's true there is no point in continuing the conversation, so I'll assume you just think that the growth of weapons exports has (or at least may have) exceeded the decline in US military spending.
I've shown how that is impossible. I've given the most current data, and assumed for the sake of argument that 100% of those exports represented growth in exports. It is impossible for more than 100% to represent growth in exports because you can't export a negative. So take 100% of 2005 exports. You get about a tenth of a percent of GDP. US military spending as a percent of GDP went down over 30 percentage points since WWII, close to ten percentage points since the Korea peak, and about four and a half percentage points since the Vietnam peak. That's 300+ times, close to 100 times, and about 45 times, as much as the entire level of US weapons exports for 2004 or 2005.
You keep ignoring that point. I doubt that you aren't intelligent and educated enough to understand it, so I have to think your ignoring it is deliberate.
Your argument, if you can call it that, against the point, is that I only showed two years of data. Its actually eight years of data at the link. More importantly all I need is one year of data to make the argument air tight. For any data you plug in for previous years, other than my assumed zero, the growth of military exports decreases. Again you ignore that fact, and again I think your too smart to not understand junior high math (that growth from zero to Y, is higher than growth from any possible positive X, to the same Y), so I assume you are deliberately ignoring it again.
I'll tell you what. If you demonstrate how growth from a positive X to Y, can be greater than growth from zero to Y, I'll spend the time to look up some of the data from older years. But I imagine you'd rather keep ignoring the point, because you know that it doesn't matter what the data is, I'd still be right anyway, and you know that if I actually look up the data it will support my argument. |
