David Vine, Gisela Cernadas, John Bellamy Foster —
The U.S. government, journalists, and others have long failed to accurately report what taxpayers spend on war and the military. Both Congress and the executive branch report yearly military spending figures that are profoundly incomplete, giving the public only a partial understanding of how much taxpayer money goes to funding armed conflict and the armed forces. Most members of the media, analysts, academics, and others repeat the figures reported by the government, perpetuating the problem. For several decades, the co-authors of this report and a small number of fellow budget analysts have used multiple accounting methods to show that conventional reporting 3 dramatically underestimates the true size of military spending — often underestimating spending by half. This report provides accurate estimates of the military budget, reviewing four existing methodologies and introducing a new methodology that draws on publicly accessible government data. Each calculation shows that annual military spending is at a minimum between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion, and between $1.7 trillion and $2.3 trillion when counting interest payments on U.S. government debt attributable to military spending.
Link to the Report: Pogo_$2T is True Total US Military Budget_Report
