People throw around these facts, comparing them to one another, without really understanding the scales involved.
Half of discretionary government spending should be on the military. Sure, other countries that rely on bigger nations for their defense can get away with much smaller defense budgets, but a powerful hegemonic nation whose stability the entire world relies on needs a dominant military, and those aren't cheap.
The primary role of a state that is serving its people and not the other way around is foreign policy and defense. What kept the Roman Empire alive for so many centuries was that other nations simply feared to openly challenge it militarily. Even banding together, they could not hope to withstand Roman legions.
You made another comparison, that military spending is larger than the whole of China's trade with the US. That's irrelevant, it only means that the US is in a completely different league economically than China.
Government spending is ultimately limited by its nation's economy. A command economy can spend more on things relative to the nation's GDP, but that limits the potential for the command economy to grow. This undeniable fact has driven China's domestic policy for decades. China has to modernize into a more liberal economy, otherwise it won't be able to survive. But it hasn't quite done that yet.
The US, on the other hand, has had for its entire run a liberal economy, and a GDP to match. The US economy is so vast, so enormous, that just the 1.75% of it we spend on the military is more money than a lot of countries' entire economies. It really is that big.
People throw around these facts, comparing them to one another, without really understanding the scales involved.
Half of discretionary government spending should be on the military. Sure, other countries that rely on bigger nations for their defense can get away with much smaller defense budgets, but a powerful hegemonic nation whose stability the entire world relies on needs a dominant military, and those aren't cheap.
The primary role of a state that is serving its people and not the other way around is foreign policy and defense. What kept the Roman Empire alive for so many centuries was that other nations simply feared to openly challenge it militarily. Even banding together, they could not hope to withstand Roman legions.
You made another comparison, that military spending is larger than the whole of China's trade with the US. That's irrelevant, it only means that the US is in a completely different league economically than China.
Government spending is ultimately limited by its nation's economy. A command economy can spend more on things relative to the nation's GDP, but that limits the potential for the command economy to grow. This undeniable fact has driven China's domestic policy for decades. China has to modernize into a more liberal economy, otherwise it won't be able to survive. But it hasn't quite done that yet.
The US, on the other hand, has had for its entire run a liberal economy, and a GDP to match. The US economy is so vast, so enormous, that just the 1.75% of it we spend on the military is more money than a lot of countries' entire economies. It really is that big.