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A Congressional Budget Office analysis that puts a $1.6 trillion price tag on a proposed health care plan with a public option has caused dismay among backers of the plan. Far less anghish has been shown for the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which currently are at about the $1 trillion mark and are projected to cost two or even three times that over the long term.
$1.6 trillion is an almost unimaginable amount of money but the U.S. will spend more than that on the military -- even excluding the cost of the two wars -- in less than three years.
Our military expenditure should be put into perspective. The U.S., with about five percent of the world's population, accounts for close to one-half of world military spending. Besides the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, excluded from this comparison spending percentage is the interest paid in each Pentagon budget on the carryover costs of past wars. Some military budget analysts contend that a good deal of military spending is concealed in other departmental budgets, such as the Department of Justice's maintenance of the nuclear weapons complex. Thus, although the current military budget is pegged at about $560 billion, some analysts put the true cost at $800 billion to $1.2 trillion. This is so even though the U.S. does not face a credible military foe in the world.
The U.S. risks suffering the fate of failed nation-states wich have allowed exaggerated security concerns to consume the bulk of the resources needed to build a better society.
