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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Raymond Duray who wrote (217545)	2/5/2005 12:16:16 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573106

Most of the debt has occurred when defense was less then 41% of the budget. Defense was greater then 41% of the budget in WWII and we ran up a lot of debt then, but the economy was much smaller. In nominal terms most of the debt has been since the end of the Vietnam War and during that period defense was always less then 41% of the budget. If you adjust for inflation than the importance of WWII grows (but still the 41% figure seems high), but I do not think many people would say that that we should have not spent what it took to defeat the Nazis and the Japanese threat. OTOH adding while $138 Billion to defense to include interest might be off but its probably not massively off, at least if you accept the assumptions behind the calculation. If it was only $100bil or even $60bil it still would be a lot of money that isn't counted in the official defense budget. But then you would have to do the same sort of calculation for social security and Medicare and all other federal programs to get a complete picture. And I suppose the full $138bil figure isn't impossible. But it looks backwards (WWII has to be a big part of it if you are going to get 41%) while the non-defense part of the budget (no matter what you throw under the term defense) is growing much faster, has been for a long time, and will probably continue to do so for the rest of my life. Tim