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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (50173)

8/4/2013 12:37:44 PM

From: TimF

Respond to of 85487

Zero was spent on tax cuts, tax cuts aren't spending.

Defense was a small part of the spending increase.

The President's budget for FY1997 totals $1.635 trillion.
...
$251.8 billion (-7.0%) - Department of Defense (including Overseas Contingency Operations)
en.wikipedia.org

The enacted budget contained $2.469 trillion in receipts and $3.796 trillion in outlays, for a deficit of $1.327 trillion.
...

Department of Defense including Overseas Contingency Operations	$701.6 billion	$683.0 billion	$5.8 billion	$5.3 billion

en.wikipedia.org

The four figures are "Discretionary, requested", "Discretionary, enacted", "Mandatory, requested" and "Mandatory, enacted" the total spending enacted as the combination of the 2nd and 4th or $688.3 bil.

Which gives an increase of $436.5bil/year in defense, out of a total spending increase of $1327bil. Making defense under a third of the increase. And that's in a period of particuarly strong defense increases. If you look in the longer term in the past, or look toward the projections of the future, defense increases in dollar terms are a smaller portion of the increases, and defense showed a marked decline in the past as a percentage of total federal spending, and almost certainly will continue to decline. Defense spending has also been in a long term decline as a percentage of the economy, and that decline will continue in to the future.

In short defense simply isn't driving budget deficits, and pretty much hasn't since at least Vietnam, and hasn't been the dominate driver since WWII.