{"id":14154,"date":"2012-02-20T09:25:22","date_gmt":"2012-02-20T17:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=14154"},"modified":"2012-02-20T09:28:22","modified_gmt":"2012-02-20T17:28:22","slug":"the-real-us-military-budget-1-trillion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/20\/the-real-us-military-budget-1-trillion\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real US Military Budget: $1 Trillion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/politics\/archive\/12\/02\/the-real-defense-budget\/253327\/\">Steve Clemons at the Atlantic<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A Republican, numbers-compulsive defense wonk at the Center for Defense Information,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cdi.org\/staff\/staffinfo.cfm?StaffID=81\">Winslow Wheeler<\/a>, has published a great summary of what America&#8217;s defense budget &#8216;really&#8217; is.<\/p>\n<p>Wheeler offers a chart of the budget figures for both 2012 and 2013 &#8212; starting with what is called the &#8220;DOD Base Budget (Discretionary)&#8221;.\u00a0 He then adds line items from different accounts throughout other parts of the budget that really should be part of what is considered defense and security &#8212; including the odd factoid that the Department of Defense and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issue different figures of what the DOD Base Budget really is &#8212; with the Pentagon shorting what it gives the media by about $6 billion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/20\/the-real-us-military-budget-1-trillion\/defense-budget-2012-2013-2\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-14156\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-14156\" title=\"Defense Budget 2012 2013\" src=\"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Defense-Budget-2012-20131.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"562\" height=\"499\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Defense-Budget-2012-20131-300x266.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Defense-Budget-2012-20131.jpg 562w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 562px) 100vw, 562px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Using the more common, lower figures like the\u00a0$728 billion military budget the U.S. allocated in 2010, <a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/archives\/2012\/02\/14\/the-invincible-military-industrial-compl\">Veronique de Rugy recently wrote<\/a> that&#8217;s &#8220;about 45 percent of the world\u2019s $1.6 trillion total, more than the next 14 largest military spenders combined and nearly six times more than the next biggest spender, China.&#8221; Using Wheelers numbers those ratios are even more jarring.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine if a fraction of that $1 trillion dollars was given to you to spend or invest how you please. Think you could do it <a href=\"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/donate\/\">more productively<\/a>? Well, imagine that many, many times over &#8211; if this money being shoveled into the pockets of rent-seekers in the military industrial complex and wasted abroad on killing innocent people was never taken from taxpayers to begin with.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Steve Clemons at the Atlantic: A Republican, numbers-compulsive defense wonk at the Center for Defense Information,\u00a0Winslow Wheeler, has published a great summary of what America&#8217;s defense budget &#8216;really&#8217; is. Wheeler offers a chart of the budget figures for both 2012 and 2013 &#8212; starting with what is called the &#8220;DOD Base Budget (Discretionary)&#8221;.\u00a0 He [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-14154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14154"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14163,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14154\/revisions\/14163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14154"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=14154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}