By Quinn Fisher
Photos Courtesy of Pixabay
The United States spends more on its military annually than any other country in the world. In fact, the United States spends more than the next 6 countries combined, those being China, Russia, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and Ukraine, according to SIPRI data. The U.S. defense budget is roughly $960 billion USD (as per the Peter G. Peterson Foundation), and second place, China, is roughly $277 billion USD. Current proposals running through our government lay out massive expansions to the budget coming this year, pushing it up to over $1.1 trillion USD. However, even working with just our current totals, that is a difference of $683 billion USD between the U.S. and second place.
Our country could do so much with $683 billion. We could do things that no other
countries do. This wouldn’t even require us to cut our entire military budget, in fact, this would bring us to the same defense spending as the country directly behind us, in second place. Obviously, $683 billion is a lot of money, but it may be even more than you think it is. Here is a proposed plan for what we could do, as the United States, if we reallocated that money into other areas.
We could double the national parks budget, doubling what they are able to do to keep our country wild and beautiful. We could expand state wildlife action plans, address wildlife refuge backlogs, develop wildlife corridors and crossing across the nation, respond to invasive species, and recover key wetland ecosystems in our nation. We could address chronic veteran homelessness, the people who actually fought the wars that the defense budget funds, creating permanent supportive housing for all U.S. veterans. We could increase the NIH budget by over 10%, allowing for crucial research done in medicine across the country by leading scientists, tackling Alzheimer’s research, Cancer Moonshot, and other cancer research programs, advancing our search
in the cure for cancer. We could fully fund all cancer treatment for every single U.S. citizen facing struggles with cancer in this country. We could make university education, at all public universities across the country, for all U.S. citizens completely free. We could give every single K-12 teacher in the entire country an annual raise of $30,000, drastically increasing education quality, teacher retention, and our public education system as whole. We could increase the budget of NASA by nearly a third, making plans for a permanent, human-supporting base on the moon, allowing for the first semi-permanent settlement anywhere outside our country, which could be accomplished with this added budget in only 3-4 years. We could transition the entire U.S. energy grid to 100% renewable, green energy, in only 10 years. We could end all poverty in the U.S., taking one of the biggest issues in the world completely out of our nation. We could end world hunger, globally, all by 2030. Ending the starvation of adults and children around the globe, completely by ourselves with this budget, and in such a short time span. Don’t these all sound like great uses of our budget? Each one of these could be considered better than spending it to be so far ahead of second place in military spending. But what if I told you that you didn’t have to choose? All of these could all be done with this budget at the same time, and it would leave us ahead of second place by almost $2 billion USD, still first in the world in military spending, with all these utopian benefits of this money and what it could do.
| Item | Annual Cost | Annual Funds Remaining | Source |
| Original Budget Minus Second Place | 960 billion – 277 billion | 683 billion | Peter G. Peterson Foundation |
| End World Hunger (by 2030) | 93 billion | 590 billion | United Nations Estimates |
| End Poverty in the U.S. | 168 billion | 422 billion | American Community Survey |
| Fund All U.S. Cancer Treatment | 183 billion | 239 billion | Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM) |
| Free Public Domestic University Tuition (Last Dollar) | 35 billion | 214 billion | Education Data Initiative |
| $30,000 Annual Salary Raise for all U.S. K-12 Teachers | 120 billion | 94 billion | Nation Center for Education Statistics |
| Double the U.S. National Parks Department Budget | 2.2 billion | 91.8 billion | National Parks Service |
| Expansion of State Wildlife Action Plans | ~1.2 billion | 90.6 billion | |
| Wildlife Corridors and Crossing Development | ~1.1 billion | 89.5 billion | |
| Addressing Wildlife Refuge Backlogs | ~1 billion | 88.5 billion | |
| Invasive Species and Wetland Restoration | ~0.7 billion | 87.8 billion | |
| 100% Green Energy Transition, 10 years (on top of current private and government annual investment) | 72 billion | 15.8 billion | The Renewable Energy Institute, Wood Mackenzie Power Grid Study |
| Veteran Supportive Housing | 1.05 billion | 14.75 billion | U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs |
| Increase NASA Budget By just over 32.7%, or Almost a Third (3-4 years until Moon Base) | 8 billion | 6.75 billion | NASA Funding Department, CNN Recorded NASA Statement |
| Just Over 10.6% Budget Increase to NIH | 5 billion | 1.75 billion | Congress Budget Reports |
This proposed list of items could all be done with this extra budget, and still leave almost $2 billion remaining, not as our total defense budget, but on top of the $277 billion USD that China spends, keeping us still in the lead. Our military overspending in the past has made us by far the strongest military on the planet, so the gap is already enormous. To stay in this lead, we do not need much funding, and maintaining this lead over second place will mean our gap will still continue to widen, even beyond the dominance we already have, if at a lower rate, we will almost certainly remain in that top spot.
In addition, many of these plans, such as the green energy transition and world hunger elimination have timelines, and after reaching those deadlines, would need significantly less funding out of the budget, just a small fraction to maintain them, meaning that those portions of the funding could be reallocated again, whether back into military and defense spending, or into one of the other myriad developments that could benefit our country, such as greater public healthcare coverage, or replacing the lead water service lines across our country by increasing funding to the EPA. To justify the highest military spending in the world, we should have one of the best countries in the world. Before worrying about defending what we have, we should make sure what we have is great, that it is worth all we sacrifice to defend it.
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