Defense Spending Essay, Research Paper

Defense Spending

Defense spending is how much money the government uses to for our national defense. This year President Clinton?s budget includes 267 billion dollars for defense or around 15% of the budget. The budget only includes 18 billion dollars for foreign assistance, which accounts for about 1% of the budget. This budget for military makes all others look small. Our military budget accounts for 37% of the world?s military spending. Our defense spending is five and a half times larger than the second biggest spender, Russia. We spend more that 8 times that of China and 18 times our 7 biggest adversaries (North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and Cuba). From 1985 to 1997 the worlds total defense spending was cut from 1.6 trillion dollars to 784 billion dollars, but the America?s share or the world total went from 30% to 34%.

I personally think that the whole world spends too much money on military. I think that all the countries should get together and make some agreement where they would all lower there defense spending. Or if we could make NATO strong enough to fight all terrorists maybe that would significantly lower defense spending. The government could make the people happy by cutting taxes maybe even help out the rest of the world because if other countries see that we stopped spending money on our defense then they might slow down with there spending also. This could also make the world a safer place.