Your Military Spending Bill

The Senate has just approved the newest military spending bill.

With roughly 300 million people in the USA, each person contributes approximately $2,000 to this bill.

America's defense spending is far and away the largest military budget of any other country. We will have to examine this to see if it still exceeds the military budget of all other countries combined.

Reuters: US Senate approves $636 bln military spending bill

...funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and also includes money to extend jobless aid and Medicare payment rates for two months.

The bill includes 1,720 earmarks costing $4.2 billion for lawmakers' pet projects...

The bill also would extend a handful of unrelated programs that otherwise would expire at the end of the year, or have expired already.

We have this military spending bill yet the art of tracking the real military spending budget is not an exact science.

There are cost overruns, hidden costs, black costs, all kinds of military spending that is not included in this or any of the other previous defense budgets.

Obama's 30,000 troop surge into Afghanistan is not included in this budget.

The point is that the real military spending budget is significantly higher.

Mother Jones put together a comprehensive article on the real military budget.

Mother Jones: Shock and Audit: The Hidden Defense Budget

The Office of Management and Budget calculates a total for defense spending throughout different parts of the government (it includes money allocated to the Pentagon, nuclear weapons activities at the Department of Energy and some security spending in the State Department and FBI). In the 2010 budget, that figure was $707 billion, more than half of the government's discretionary spending for the year. (Discretionary spending is the money that's appropriated every year by Congress, rather than entitlement programs like Medicare for which funding is mandatory).