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

To: Road Walker who wrote (328618)	3/12/2007 5:47:47 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575092

No not a guess. Its "a guess" in the same sense that a statement that Shia outnumber Sunni in Iraq and Iran would be a guess, because we don't have the exact totals. In other words not a guess at all. If I said the US had more people in 1939 than it did in 1870 I wouldn't be guessing despite the fact that I don't know either population figure. You can have knowledge, and understanding even in the absence of exact precision. If two figures are really close than you do need precise info to say which is bigger (assuming one isn't defined in relation to the other), but when there is a large difference you don't need very precise information to know there is a large difference. But you want some hard data? OK - "In 2005 the United States led in arms transfer agreements valued at nearly $12.8 billion...down from $13.2 billion in 2004" fas.org That site also had information about arms deliveries but they where only $11.6 bil in 2005. I took the higher figure to make the data as favorable to your case as possible. So the average for 2004-2005 is $13bil per year. That's about one tenth of one percent of the US GDP. That means the increase in the "military industrial complex" as a percentage of GDP, is at most .1% (we couldn't have sold less then $0 dollars worth of weapons in any year), and since we sold weapons all through the cold war the increase may be much less, or may even be an actual decrease. But lets take the position that is most favorable to your argument, and assume we sold $0 dollars worth of weapons to other countries during the cold war. That gives us a +.1% of GDP increase in the military industrial complex since then. OK so we get plus +.1% from that factor, now how much did it decrease by having an American military that is smaller (in absolute and percentage terms) and spends less (in percentage of GDP terms) than the cold war military? Percentage of GDP spent on defense 1944 (20th century and probably all time peak) 37.8 Korean War - 13.1 to 14.2 1953 (post WWII high) 14.2 1965 (lowest point between Korea and the end of Vietnam) 7.4 1968 (Vietnam peak) 9.4 1970 8.1 1975 5.5 1986 (Reagan peak) 6.2 2007 (estimate) about 4 to 5% (depending on whether you count the official budget or all military spending, and depending on GDP growth, and what happens in Iraq) OK so take the current 5%. If we measure from the all time peak were down 32.8 percentage points, if we measure from the Korean war high then its down 9.2 points, from the local low in '65 2.4 points, from the Vietnam peak 4.4 points, from the Reagan peak 1.2 points. Even if we measure from the Reagan peak (which was much lower than the Vietnam or Korea peaks) and again we assume no weapons sales overseas until 2004, the decrease in US spending is 12 times the percentage of GDP as the highest possible increase in weapons exports. And since I was talking about Korea and Vietnam more than Reagan the difference is even greater. Also we did sell a lot of weapons overseas during the cold war. Basically any possible increase in overseas weapons sales isn't just smaller then the reduction in American military spending (again as a percentage of the economy) it dwarfed by the US military decrease. The disparity is so large that there was no guessing involved even before I looked up the precise data on exports.