Andy Rooney has tricky statistics (Score 1)

Regarding the "Ike was right.." and Andy Rooney comments... the stats good ole Andy provides http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10 504.htm are - shocker - a bit misleading. He says "No other Country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year Japan spent $42 billion. Italy spent $28 billion, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion."

Boy it sounds unbelievably bad - We are spending 10x what Japan spends and a shocking 24x what Russia spends! Well, I'm not saying it's not bad, but it certainly isn't THAT BAD. At least not when you think for a few seconds and realize the only way to sensibly approach this is to look at military expenditures as a % of GDP. (for source material check http://www.sipri.org/contents/milap/milex/mex_data base1.html and http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/.

From that perspective things make a lot more sense - in 2004 the US spent between 3.2 and 3.9% of GDP (based on whose expediture estimates you use), while the UK and France spent about 2.6%. Germany, Japan, and Italy spent between 1.1 -1.7% of GDP - and Russia was about the same. To gain some perspective, South Korea spent about 1.7% while their unfriendly and incredibly poor neighbors to the North were able to scrape together a shocking 13% of their resources for military expenditures. Saudi Arabia came in at 6% while Israel came in at 7%. Iran is estimated as 3.3% by the CIA but I couldn't find any source material to back up that claim.

So Andy, it appears that other Countries ARE spending "the kind of money" the US is spending on military expenditures - some are spending relatively even more.

For more perspective I tried to find out how much of the US GDP is spent on IT - but all I could find was an estimate of 2.8% which appears to be for 1996. http://www.strassmann.com/pubs/datamation0297/.