I was reading a liberal blogger today who makes the claim that 54% of your income tax goes to defense spending.** It’s not the first time I have seen this statistic.

Here is the real data. According to the non-partisan congressional budget office (LINK)

Total Income tax = 1.1 trillion dollars
(not including Social Security taxes)

Total Defense spending = .5 trillion dollars

If you add a couple of billion of Iraq (dubious), you can see where they get their numbers…but it is deceiving at best.

Defense spending doesn’t come out of income tax. It comes out of all taxes. In 2007, 20% of all tax revenues was generated by other sources such as corporate taxes and estate taxes.

To complicate the matters, the government spent more than they collected. This liberal point of view assumes that all of defense spending is paid for in full by income tax and other government expenses raid the social security funds or are passed on as debt. If you consider this logic, what they are saying here is that government debt is not caused by military spending. The prime source of debt is entitlements. I don’t think they want to argue that case.

Let’s simplify it.

Defense spending in 2007 was 548 billion dollars. The total outlays by the government for the same year was 2.73 trillion dollars. Defense spending was 20% of all government spending…not 54%. There is a huge difference.

What’s more…defense spending is only 4% of GDP. This is less than half of the spending during LBJ’s Great Society when we spent nearly 10% of GDP on Vietnam. If you want to consider peace time, then Jimmy Carter spent a minimum of 4.9% of GDP on the military. Only during Bill Clinton’s terms did we dedicate less of our economy to defense.

In historical terms, we are spending far less on defense then previous generations.

**I won't link to his web site because I don't want to help him gain
traffic. You are just going to have to trust that he and his claim exist.

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