Talk:Permanent war economy

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An entry from Permanent war economy appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on 7 February 2006.

There are several gramatical errors here e.g. 'an own...' I wonder who thought this deserved to be "Did you know?" and why?

[edit] Those numbers can't be right.

The numbers about percent of GDP spent by the United States for military just don't sound right. How could it have fallen from 16% to 2%?! There were cuts in the 90s but not like that. I don't have numbers of my own so I'll just leave it alone. Otherwise very interesting article.

Glen

The numbers are from a graph of Harman (2003). According to this there was a peak in military spending as a share of GDP at about 16% in the early 50s, another one at 10% in the late 60s (Vietnam war) and finally one of about 5% in the early 80s (Reagan). Then this number dropped to below 2% 1997, the end-year of the graph. In real US-dollars (1992-US-dollars) spending used to be with ups and downs at around 260 bn. US-dollars per year. Alex1011 10:43, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

The Economist, February 11th, 2006: "Total discretionary defence spending": from 3 % GDP 2001 to 4 % 2005. (300 bn. $ to 500 bn. $) Alex1011 14:37, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

There is much more money now. Meaning that 15% then would only be a quarter of 2% now.

-G

Would it be more accurate and/or additionally informative to have defense spending as percentage of discretionary spending in the budget...I think it would give another perspective since the GDP measure appears to be misleading. Junior 03:24, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Footnotes

I don't want to mark this as unreferenced... but not marking specific areas of books is problematic as it does not allow us to verify this article easily. gren グレン 09:57, 20 February 2007 (UTC)