May 03 2003
A lot of money
A billion dollars a day. Nice work, if you can get it.
The Bush administration asked Congress to provide the Pentagon with $399.1 billion for 2004. That is a huge amount of money. That is more than a billion dollars a day. That is more than $12,000 a second- a year of college tuition.
To put it in relationship to what other countries spend, the U.S. military budget is almost seven times larger than what the second largest spender- Russia budgets for defense. It is more than 26 times the combined spending of the seven countries the Pentagon identifies as enemies. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that military spending will continue to increase at an average of 8% a year through the end of the decade. Meaning that by 2010, the military budget will top out at almost $700 billion.
Why do we need to spend so much on our military? Simple. Just ask Mr. Bush. We have a whole wide world to conquer!
Maybe if we conducted ourselves in such a manner as to be able to get along with our worldly neighbors, we wouldn’t have to spend so much to “defend” ourselves.
