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

To: tejek who wrote (570840)	6/9/2010 7:08:33 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578926

No one in the world spends nearly as much as on the military than the king of capitalism, the US. No one in the world has an economy nearly as big as ours. Quite a few countries devote a larger percentage of their resources to the military than the US does. North Korea being the most obvious example, spending 5 to 10 times as much. When there was a USSR they spent at various times, somewhere in the neighborhood of half again to eight times as large of portion of their economy than the US spent (the large range being because it varied over time, and also because the unreliability of data from communist countries). Besides the USSR having spent a much large portion of its wealth on its military than the US, the other Warsaw Pact countries also spent a larger portion than the other NATO countries. If you measure is absolute spending rather than portions of the economy, the reason that more capitalist countries spend more on defense is that they have more to spend, since their economy is less damaged by socialism. I bet the soviet ocuntries that spend the most on the military bordered capitalist countries like NK vs SK. You are implying the reverse correlation. The main reason the capitalist countries spent so much was because of the threat from the socialist countries. Ignoring causality, the USSR technically did border capitalist countries, but Norway, Finland, and even Turkey where not much of a threat. (and if the US was a threat it wouldn't have come by an invasion across the Bering Strait, if your trying to argue that that closeness is as good as having a border). Eastern European countries where not reasonably afraid of an aggressive NATO invasion across the borders during the cold war (except perhaps as a counteroffensive), and South Korea isn't much of a threat now in terms of aggression against the North (but should the North attack the South would pose a large danger of counter-offensive).