Anti-Japan protests in China spread.

[mrstickball]

SamuelRSmith said:

mai said:

If you want some real comparisons, compare military spending not against GDP, but budget. Anything GDP-related just serves the aim to delude people, you need to know what exactly contributes to GDP, how exactly budget correlates to GDP, taxtion, laws... omg, my head already hurts. But if compared against budget it makes the picture not perfectly but clear enough, the US spend smth like 20-25% of budget on military, this's high. As high as Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, India, but less than UAE (your ally). Not exactly the dove of peace, lol.

You have to consider that the United States political system works very differently to most other countries. Yes, defense as percentage of Federal budget is high... but it's one of the few areas that the Federal Government is supposed to focus on. When you include state Governments, which do most of the things that most central Governments do, the numbers are different. Also, local, etc.

To be fair, we have to spend 20-25% on the military since so many other countries that we're allied with won't bother to defend themselves. If the Europeans and Japanese would bother to get off their rear end and spend at a reasonable, NATO-required level, we wouldn't need to spend as much.