Today I came across an interesting factoid. The United States military (army, navy, national guard, etc.) employs THREE MILLION people, and another two million are receiving benefits. The military is by far the largest employer in the nation.
Source: Department of Defense web page at: http://www.defense.gov/pubs/dod101/index.html
As I've pointed out before, the US military spends $500-$700 billion/year, roughly matching the combined expenditures of the rest of the world and ten times more than any other country.
Less you think I just hate the military, let me point to some other expenditures.
Social Security - $730 billion
Medicare & Medicaid - $790 billion
Is anybody else troubled by this? These numbers make my eyes bleed. Do you know how many happy meals I could buy with all this money? We've got these three major expenses that eat up 3/4 of our budget, but nobody can touch them because they are all entitlements. That is, somebody is benefiting and they will throw a fit if you take them, and then you won't get re-elected.
So, we just keep spending, to the tune of $3.5 trillion/year. We spend $185 billion just on interest for our debt.
Sometimes I wish we could follow the ancient Greek's system of electing a temporary dictator to clean up theses sorts of problems and then return order to the elected assemblies (obviously I don't really want a dictator to govern us, but I do envy that they had some solution).
What solution can we have to correct our over-spending? How do we get our elected officials to stop supporting the projects/expenditures that get them elected? Do we need to revert to some sort of libertarian utopia for a few years and then rebuild from scratch? I don't think so, but I'm at a loss for a better idea.
