Military Spending Research Paper
Military Spending
Before you can even begin to look and compare opportunity costs in each country you need to understand exactly what it means. According to Investopedia.com opportunity cost is defined as, “The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action.” In government we see this when one economic issue takes precedent over another financially. I will show examples of this throughout this essay.
(Format) Country, GDP, Military Spending, Military Spend*(100pct) / GDP, GDP/Population
USA, $14.66 trillion, $595 billion, 4.06%, $47,200
Russia, $2.22 trillion, $86 billion, 3.9%, $15,900
Japan, $4.31 trillion, $34 billion, …show more content…
In the above examples we are looking at numbers and percentages that are being used to fund our military instead of things like education, medical, research, etc. For example, if the US government spends $595bn on the war in Iraq, it is $595bn they cannot spend on education, health care or cutting taxes / reducing budget deficit.
We can draw many different conclusions based on the numbers above, one being that the U.S GDP numbers are significantly higher; the amount of military spending is also significantly higher along with the percentages. One reason for this is that the US has more money to spend and all in all is a wealthier country. We can look at the other economic states of each country and try to add a correlation between them all, Russia has about the same percentages as the US but is about 12.4Tn less in GDP than the US. Japan is only spending .8% on Military but we all know that they are also limited and have heavy restrictions on what they are allowed to spend. Brazil and North Korea are two countries that are very hard to analyze because most of the data given does not give direct correlation of one another so in my opinion we can only really compare USA, Russia and possibly
Before you can even begin to look and compare opportunity costs in each country you need to understand exactly what it means. According to Investopedia.com opportunity cost is defined as, “The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action.” In government we see this when one economic issue takes precedent over another financially. I will show examples of this throughout this essay.
(Format) Country, GDP, Military Spending, Military Spend*(100pct) / GDP, GDP/Population
USA, $14.66 trillion, $595 billion, 4.06%, $47,200
Russia, $2.22 trillion, $86 billion, 3.9%, $15,900
Japan, $4.31 trillion, $34 billion, …show more content…
In the above examples we are looking at numbers and percentages that are being used to fund our military instead of things like education, medical, research, etc. For example, if the US government spends $595bn on the war in Iraq, it is $595bn they cannot spend on education, health care or cutting taxes / reducing budget deficit.
We can draw many different conclusions based on the numbers above, one being that the U.S GDP numbers are significantly higher; the amount of military spending is also significantly higher along with the percentages. One reason for this is that the US has more money to spend and all in all is a wealthier country. We can look at the other economic states of each country and try to add a correlation between them all, Russia has about the same percentages as the US but is about 12.4Tn less in GDP than the US. Japan is only spending .8% on Military but we all know that they are also limited and have heavy restrictions on what they are allowed to spend. Brazil and North Korea are two countries that are very hard to analyze because most of the data given does not give direct correlation of one another so in my opinion we can only really compare USA, Russia and possibly