National Defense - Are we spending too much? (Hint: Yes)

Basically, the US has a larger share of world military spending than it has of world anything-else.  Our spending far exceeds that of nations with recent history of war and strong credible threats to their sovereignty (such as Israel).  China, with a larger population, larger land area, worse world relations, a not too distant history of being invaded and occupied, and significantly crazier and more belligerent neighbors, has managed to keep its spending to 1/6th of ours.  It's obvious that our military isn't for the defense of our nation, but rather for the forceful enactment of US will outside of its borders.  Here are some numbers:

Signs of Sanity (even on RedState)

For those of you who don't know, RedState is the foaming at the mouth conservative blog that manages to occasionally include some form of evidence or (more rarely) reason in their discussions.  I like to highlight these moments as a matter of principle.  Here's one in which they admit that the debt ceiling absolutely has to be raised and that it was stupid to use it to do the deficit reduction thing.   Now, the post has some weird ideas about government spending.  For instance, this line:

The underlying politics is as follows: the American people are sick and tired of deficit spending. The pundits are completely wrong when they downplay this issue, because deficits are FAR worse now than they ever have been in peacetime (10+% of GDP). And they got far worse at almost the exact moment Obama was elected president.

I don't know why people keep forgetting that we are AT WAR, and that this is the first war in American History that wasn't paid for with higher taxes.  Maybe I got the direction of that wrong; people keep forgetting that we are at war because we have neglected to pay for the two we are in.   And as for the "got far worse at almost the exact moment Obama was elected president" thing, that is completely true, which sort of highlights the fact that he couldn't possibly have been at fault for it.  I mean, if we want to talk about deficit spending... the only president who didn't do it in recent memory has been Clinton.  I'm really not sure why that would give us the idea that Democrats are the ones who don't care about fiscal responsibility, but that sure seems to be the popular opinion.

The other strange thing about the article is that it starts with the premise that the debt ceiling was a bad place to raise the issue, and ends with the conclusion that Republicans should use the debt ceiling to raise the issue, but consistency is maybe too much to ask for.  Still, my complaints about this post have to do with its mission, not its sanity, and I greatly prefer that so kudos to Francis Cianfrocca.