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

To: Road Walker who wrote (328854)	3/14/2007 4:32:29 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576348

As said before, the "defense budget" is vastly understated. Which doesn't make a difference. As long as you define it consistently its greatly shrunk as a portion of our economy. Those figures for previous years would also be larger if they included DoE, work by the FBI and CIA and State, pensions, etc. And in fact the decrease as a percentage of GDP since Korea, or even since Vietnam, has been bigger then the total percentage of GDP represented by all the activities you consider defense spending that aren't part of the DoD budget. Your quibbling about details that are marginal on the scale of the reduction I'm talking about. The defense budget alone was 14.2% of the GDP in 1953 and 9.4% in 1968. Add up the budget for DoD, Homeland Security, the CIA, the VA, State, and the nuclear weapons related activity of the Department of Energy, and then throw in foreign weapons sales, and you don't get to 9.4% of our GDP.

To: Road Walker who wrote (328854)	3/14/2007 4:34:59 PM
From: RetiredNow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576348

As said before, the "defense budget" is vastly understated. You are exactly right. Here's a concrete example. Bush and friends asked and got another $120B for Iraq recently. That money was not part of the budget and was not reported as part of our defense budget, since it was outside the budgeting process. Bush has found an effective way of playing games with military spending to make it seem less than it is. I wish our gov't was held to the same GAAP standards as the rest of the companies in the US. If they did that, Americans would be damn shocked to find out that not only are we close to bankrupt, but our annual deficits are double what is actually being reported through the fudged budgets that are currently published.