Whatever the argument, I believe in convincing others with the merit of my point, and the gross misrepresentation of the numbers here utterly frustrated me. I'm not denying that the US spends an incredible amount on defense, but a key point was left out of this post: these numbers are ABSOLUTE numbers. The US is a much bigger country than France, which stands #2 in absolute standing. Normalizing to population, the US spending is ~$1900 per capita, whereas France stands at ~$1150 per capita. Yes, the US spending is still almost twice is high, but not so egregiously off-balanced as the original numbers would have you believe.
Because I have nothing better to do on a Sunday, I normalized the list for spendings by country and re-arranged the list by per-capita defense spendings:
- United States - $1919
- Israel - $1300
- Saudi Arabia - $1255
- France - $1158
- UK - $1137
- Australia - $974
- Netherands - $730
- South Korea - $568
- Italy - $549
- Germany - $543
- Canada - $516
- Republic of China (Taiwan) - $457
- Spain - $349
- Japan - $326
- Poland - $284
- Russia - $281
- Turkey - $214
- Brazil - $136
- China - $44
- India - $23
Now what's immediately interesting is that Israel and Saudi Arabia are right up there with the US in per-capita defense spending. China and India, with their huge populations, are all of a sudden at the bottom of the list (though China's is probably still lower than actual). More over, developed countries overall spend a lot more on defense than developing countries.
3 comments:
"We're number one! We're number one!" *cough* Just kidding.
Makes total sense that the developed nations spend more on defense than the others. In fact, I would hazard a guess that that's been true throughout history. It's probably a good bet that the Roman Empire spent more on keepings its legions well-funded than the surrounding, less developed nations. And so it goes...
well why would developing countries spend more on defense? They're trying to gain, not vehemently protect what they already have
Just a note. Per capita costs of fighting an ongoing war are always high. China's per capita cost of their military is "cost divided by population (how many billion) will always seem low. Redo this when the war in Iraq ends, clean up is complete and we are at peace (will we ever be?.) If Obama pulls us out of Iraq (that is if he fools the public and wins) and we don't have to go back to stop a bloodbath, our costs per capita will drop dramatically. Mike
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