When I give speeches on fiscal policy, I commonly get some variation of this question (and you can choose one of more of the options).
Isn’t our fiscal problem largely the result of the wars/intervention/Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya/Syria launched by Bush/Hillary/neocons/Blackwater/Pentagon?
I generally respond by first confessing my lack of expertise on military and foreign affairs, but then I point out that I’m not a fan of nation building (see George Will and Mark Steyn on this topic), so I tell people that I’m very sympathetic to the proposition that trillions of dollars that have been misspent on foreign adventurism this century. Not to mention the human cost of dead and wounded American soldiers.
But I then tell audiences that the Pentagon is not the reason why we’re in fiscal trouble.
Let’s look at two charts, both derived from the Office and Management and Budget’s historical data.
First, here are two pie charts based on the spreadsheet in Table 4.2, which looks at how much of the budget is consumed by different agencies and departments. For both 1962 and 2016, I added together outlays for the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs and compared that military-related spending to other major categories.
As you can see, military-related outlays used to account for more than one-half of the federal budget, but not they are less than one-fourth of total spending in Washington.

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