America’s staggering defense budget, in charts

[Bill USA]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/07/everything-chuck-hagel-needs-to-know-about-the-defense-budget-in-charts/

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The United States spends far more than any other country on defense and security. Since 2001, the base defense budget has soared from $287 billion to $530 billion — and that’s before accounting for the primary costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But now that those wars are ending and austerity is back in vogue, the Pentagon will have to start tightening its belt in 2013 and beyond. If Hagel gets confirmed as secretary of defense, he’ll have to figure out how best to do that.

Below, we’ve provided an overview of the U.S. defense budget — to get a better sense for what we spend on, and where Hagel might have to cut:

1) The United States spent 20 percent of the federal budget on defense in 2011.



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All told, the U.S. government spent about $718 billion on defense and international security assistance in 2011 — more than it spent on Medicare. That includes all of the Pentagon’s underlying costs as well as the price tag for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which came to $159 billion in 2011. It also includes arms transfers to foreign governments.

(Note that this figure does not, however, include benefits for veterans, which came to $127 billion in 2011, or about 3.5 percent of the federal budget. If you count those benefits as “defense spending,” then the number goes up significantly.)

U.S. defense spending is expected to have risen in 2012, to about $729 billion, and then is set to fall in 2013 to $716 billion, as spending caps start kicking in.

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[Sekhmets Daughter]

1. It just keeps getting more depression inducing. n/t

[SamKnause]

2. Budget

I am confused why Social Security is represented on the chart.

I thought it was funded by employee and employer deductions that went into a fund for Social Security.

[RC]

3. Social Security is a separate line item onto itself.

But there are bad guys working against us common people on both sides of the political spectrum.
Keep telling everyone that Social Security is part of the debt, long enough and pretty soon people will start to believe it is so, even though it is not and never was.

[SamKnause]

4. Social Security

Thanks for the clarification.

I knew it didn't have anything to do with the debt, hence my confusion.