Money Spent on Military Best Spent Elsewhere?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 08:59:00 +0000

So I was on Facebook and my sister re-posted a graph about military spending that was sort of interesting.

Along with the graph there was a commentary that more or less indicated that we could be doing something more meaningful with the dollars spent on the military. Such as providing universal health care, researching in alternative energy, providing decent public transportation, availability of high speed light rail, etc. It was postulated that other highly industrialized countries had these great boons and we did not because of our outrageous military spending. Clearly from the graph we outspend every country on earth on our military spending and we spend significant dollars.

At first blush I am eager to buy into the "Like" mentality of Facebook and agree of course that if our military spending was only cut we could spend our money more wisely. But, then I remembered the rule of the internet, that you can't just assume anything posted on the net is the gospel truth, you need to dig a little deeper and not just react with emotion Graphs like this tend to make issues seem obvious when the story is often more grey than black or white.

So I did some thinking and some basic research and came up with these thoughts:

Univeral Health Care (UCH) - The United States is first in per capita spending on health care (Link). The most of any country in the world and almost twice as much as most other industrialized nations. (US 8K, Norway 5K, Switzerland, 5K, Canada 4K, Germany 4K, France 4K etc) It doesn't seem like were not spending enough money on health care. So is spending the reason we do not have UHC? I'll leave out the question of whether or not UHC is a good thing for another time.
Renewable Energy - The US is first in Renewable Energy Capacity (Link, See Page 6). The US is 2nd in clean energy investment (Link, See Page 7), we only trail behind China (who has 4 times our population) in investment. So we have more clean energy than other countries and we are not investing less than other countries in research. So maybe there's something else at play that we do not have readily available renewable energy?
Public Transportation - I tend to agree that the limited role of government should include infrastructure items such as transportation. The US is last in use of public transportation (Link) so I'm not entirely certain that we have too little spending here. Is this chicken or the egg? Do we not use public transportation because it's not available or is there not a lot of need for public transportation so we don't build it? I tend to think US cities tend to have a lot of sprawl to them with a large portion of the population living in suburbia, so perhaps public transportation is not needed as much. With the cost of energy going up, perhaps in time the US population will be forced to choose to travel less and will consider moving to large cities to be close to their jobs, but for now this does not seem to be an issue.
High Speed Light Rail (HSLR) - I didn't find any data on how our spending compares to other countries at first Google, but I'm guessing it's out there and I also guess we invest less per capita then other countries. Feel free to prove me wrong on that one. However, I am torn on this topic...does the lack of my ability to jump on a high speed commuter train and get a ride to Chicago, Denver or other major metropolitan areas from Minneapolis inconvenience me in any way? I can jump on a plane at any time (costly) or trade speed for my car on our interstate. The benefits seen in other countries (Link) seem to generally be those of reduced travel costs, less airplane usage (where HSLR connects cities), and economic benefit to those smaller towns along the rail. If your goal is to eliminate some air travel or provide economic boon to rural areas that would be connected (perhaps at the cost to the urban areas that support airlines) then I guess having more HSLR is a good thing.

So my initial reaction on are we blowing money on the military that we could be using elsewhere was not so clear after all. We don't seem to be spending less than other countries in a number of these areas and where we do spend less there maybe a reason we haven't invested already. This reason may have nothing to do with the size of the pie we make available for the military.

So do we spend too much on our military, even if spending money elsewhere might not be the issue? Does the government not spend money where it should in general? That my friends are questions for another day that I might pontificate about...

Stuff I Think About

Money Spent on Military Best Spent Elsewhere?