By Dave Lindorff
(Common Dreams) The 2011 military budget, by the way, is the largest in history, not just in actual dollars, but in inflation adjusted dollars, exceeding even the spending in World War II, when the nation was on an all-out military footing.
Military spending in all its myriad forms works out to represent 53.3% of total US federal spending.
For the past decade, and continuing under the present administration, military budgets have been rising at a 9% annual clip, making health care inflation look tiny by comparison.
It is also half of the entire global spending on war and weaponry. In 2009, according to the venerable War Resisters League, US military spending accounted for 47% of all money spent globally on war, weapons and military preparedness. America and its friends and allies account for more than two-thirds of all military spending worldwide.
Meanwhile Iran, which the White House and Congress are portraying as America’s arch enemy despite its not having invaded another country in hundreds of years, isn’t even on the list of the top 17 military big-spenders.
Read the rest Your Tax Dollars at War: More Than 53% of Your Tax Payment Goes to the Military | CommonDreams.org.
