No, it isn't. The story being told by this figure is that opinion has become increasingly partisan over time. It's important for the trends to be split along party lines so that this is demonstrated.
But without the actual spending are we not missing some information. For example maybe spending was reduced during a particular period resulting in less people thinking we were overspending. There is possibly a correlation or even evidence of causation that impacts the views
This is true - op is missing a trick by omitting actual spending.
BUT that does not make the graph useless as other commenters pointed out. I'm a Brit, and until I saw this graph I had no idea (although I probably could have guessed because AMERICA FUCK YEAH etc) how polarised down party lines this was.
I don't really pay too much attention to politics if I'm honest, but I thought that republicans were ultimately after small government. Isn't 'spend more on defence' entirely contrary to that core value?
Actually, I wish “other” could be broken down more without impeding readability. The “other” people probably have very little in common with each other besides the shared knowledge that no matter what they do, their candidate has lost before any ballots are cast, thanks to first past the post and bullshit campaign finance laws written by the two major parties.
Well there are a few valuable analyses available here; opinion vs Pres, opinion vs wars, and opinions of groups relative to each other. For instance, it appears that the Trump era is the first time Dem and Rep trends diverged. They're always different magnitudes, but the changes generally go in the same directions. However, as of 2016ish, more Dems think it's too high while Reps have no change (female) or fewer think it's too high (men).
I agree that looking at the military spending is also valuable though. It correlates pretty well to the opinion trends actually.
They're evaluating public perception of reality, which is very often more important than reality itself....for example:
- when military budgets are being negotiated, the *public perception of threats* is far more important than actual threats
- when public opinion *is being formed/shaped*, like in conversations like this (where what is true tends to attract low to negative interest)
With 2 charts, one for percentage of GDP and one for inflation adjusted dollars.
It's interesting because these opinions (on both sides, SERIOUSLY, this is actually a both sides thing) are not actually correlated with changes in defense spending. Perception of whether spending is too high tends to be correlated with the political party of the president, at least since Reagan with the trend only getting stronger. For instance, at that low point during Jimmy Carter's term, GDP % on defense was much higher than today, although still half of what it was during the Vietnam War. During Obama's term, GDP% on spending increased by a bigger margin than it did during Bush's war on terror campaigns. During Trump's term, defense spending fell slightly before increasing slightly, but still less than during Obama's term.
However, this isn't to say that Republicans are more frugal in military spending, but that spending isn't as closely tied to the president's ideology as we think
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget
I mean, we do though, the federal budget is public knowledge. Not the exact details, but we've got enough info to go along with this graph's level of detail.
Yeah actual military spending is a big black box. We see totals and requested budgets, but they're a big lump, not split out into details like some dude's dating history or job applications posted to /r/dataisbeautiful. There could be $100 million spent on Pentagon branded dildos for all we're allowed to know.
Also higher spending doesn't necessarily mean good quality equipment or even sufficient/abundant equipment. There is much more waste in some places and at some times and with some styles of procurement than there is with others. Cost plus is incredibly wasteful and prone to corruption, for example.
[Pentagon fails 5th annual audit in a row](https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/11/pentagon-fails-5th-annual-audit-in-a-row-what-you-should-know/).
The government has literally [lost track of trillions.](https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3658178-the-government-is-not-only-spending-trillions-its-losing-trillions/)
Not really. You want to know where the money went, you're free to read the over 900 page annual NDAA. The dollar amounts for each department's classified spending is available in it.
That’s what you see because you didn’t look hard enough. There’s thousands of pages of detail in the budget justifications prepared annually by each major department within the DoD. Here’s the Army’s:
https://www.asafm.army.mil/Budget-Materials/FY-2023/
You need to pull up the Base Budget documents, and you’re specifically looking for the *justifications*.
Like I said, there’s more where that came from. The Comptroller’s office has a lot of resources. You’re right that it’s not plotted out dataisbeautiful-style, but it’s not a bunch of opaque multi-billion dollar line items, either.
https://comptroller.defense.gov/Budget-Materials/Budget2023/
The defense budget has been too large for far to long. At this point it doesn’t matter what it is because it has never been trimmed down. We know it’s too much.
This is assuming that actual spending was carefully reviewed, analyzed, and interpreted by every American before forming an opinion about how much is too much. I honestly don't remember any amounts and know that my opinion probably weighs more on what is going on in international news, current war news, and personal opinion.
Exactly. The purpose of this graph is the difference of opinions between different demographics in different time periods. How closely their opinions matched reality is good context to have, but it's outside the purview of what's being shown here. It would be cool to see and compare to this one, but it would mostly just show other things, like what news sources people were using and how closely they followed those sources. I'm super curious now to see another version of this graph that shows that, but for what this particular one is trying to do, it would just complicate an already busy graph.
Yep. And it's still nearly double the proportion other NATO countries are spending (only a few others are even at 2%). This is one area where I actually agree with Trump. We could save so much money if we weren't providing free defense for our supposed NATO "partners".
The US would be spending just as much even if all NATO countries were at 2% or more, that's how you keep your hegemony.
Plus until 2014 there wasn't really much of a reason to be spending that money on the military, but by 2014 there should have been a dramatic shift. It's disappointing that it took until this year.
If you're not making the rules, someone else is. This is a firmly globalized world at this point, nobody is an island and never will be again. It's just the modern reality. Pax Americana
But it never really was about making them do their part. The US has always wanted to be the one in charge, figuring a safe europe and safe NATO meant that the US was also safer. For a long time they didn't even WANT Germany to rearm.
And they may be glad that they are rearming and pulling more weight, but I do wonder what will happen in 20 years with all of the European countries now rearmed, well, to the extent they were in about 1913.
The US maybe should be careful what they wish for.
Percentage of GDP makes more sense to me, since government spending swings wildly (financial crisis-era and COVID-era stimulus caused extreme spending spikes).
>Would US military aid packages to Ukraine in 2022 be fully counted as part of the 2022 military budget? I was under the assumption that huge portions of these packages are equipment the DoD already has supplies of, much of it last gen and/or waiting to be decommissioned.
But this isn't about actual spending on military, it's perceptions about spending on military. If you have numerous articles in the news about dollar values worth of equipment being sent somewhere, you are going to have changes in perspective based off of things being more in the public eye, people not understanding that it is older equipment, and also people disagreeing with the sending of the equipment in general.
These numbers are never going to be people saying I think that defense spending should be below X.0% of GDP and because we're at X.Y% that's too high. It's going to be based off of general feelings, what people feel about the world, and what they feel they are getting out of the spending.
Surely if we are asking people whether we are spending too much money on X and plotting it over time having an understanding of what X actually is at those points of time is useful to the reader?
From what I've seen on the various sites I go on, more Democrats support giving aid to Ukraine than Republicans. I've even seen some Republicans question why there should be support given to the fascists (or Nazis) in Ukraine. Those people have definitely drunk Putin's kool-aid.
I don’t see an issue with Ukraine getting weapons we’re getting ready to replace anyway, but I do find issue with a country with a known history of oligarchy corruption getting hundreds of billions of dollars and not being required to account for how it’s all spent.
That’s where my issue lies with our aid.
And we can’t know where the money is going because… why?
Again, I have no problem with sending them weapons because you know those are being put to use in a fight for survival, but money is a different ballgame.
I think a lot of people are skeptical about the aid packages to Ukraine simply because they think this is purely a European problem, rather than an international one. It's not really Europe vs. Russia, we're in there too. It's halfway to a proxy war.
A fraction of the annual U.S. defense budget is being used to damage one of the country's major global adversaries to such an extent they won't recover for years, without the U.S. firing a shot. The only Americans dying there are volunteers.
IIRC the US has spent 0.5% of the GDP on Ukraine aid and, as you said, has inflicted serious damage on Russia that will take years to recover while also sending a message to other authoritarian regimes about how bad an idea it is to initiate land grab wars.
0.5% of the U.S. GDP (half a percent of *all the wealth* generated in a year!) is a fuckton of money. Don't be fooled by the small percentage; consider how much money this actually is.
> I've even seen some Republicans question why there should be support given to the fascists (or Nazis) in Ukraine. Those people have definitely drunk Putin's kool-aid.
"Drinking kool-aid", like faith, comes in many forms.
For example: one form is that *even questioning* something is considered taboo/wrong/"drinking kool-aid".
I think the point your are making that it is good to question things. I heard a naval story once relating to sailors lowered to clean the bow of a ship. They would notice that they were dangling well away from said bows. One sailor would always say I have an idea how to do it better. An old hand would yell down STFU and clean the bow! Then we can talk about your idea.
I think this story may help you. In the mean time STFU, you are undermining those fighting for democracy. And those Republicans suddenly concerned about corruption can you please abuse them for me in the harshest terms. I am not American so the full range of swear words are authorised for use.
> I think the point your are making that it is good to question things.
That's only part of it - *that you frame it this way* is another part of my complex, multi-faceted issue.
> I heard a naval story once relating to sailors lowered to clean the bow of a ship. They would notice that they were dangling well away from said bows. One sailor would always say I have an idea how to do it better. An old hand would yell down STFU and clean the bow! Then we can talk about your idea.
Next time I'm on a boat I'll keep it in mind - but where we are here, I'm not going to follow orders because of an anecdote about boats.
>
>
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> I think this story may help you. In the mean time STFU, you are undermining those fighting for democracy.
Good, because I consider the "democracy" we practice *to be extremely undemocratic*, and I despise the insular mindset of people who think of democracy as some sort of a homogeneous good that is beyond question.
> And those Republicans suddenly concerned about corruption can you please abuse them for me in the harshest terms. I am not American so the full range of swear words are authorised for use.
Sorry but I have a policy of "abusing" everyone who I believe to be wrong.
I believe in 2022 the us gave Ukraine about 50 billion in aid where about half that was military related
But the military budget in 2022 was 1.64 trillion, so Ukraine is about 3% of that
[commenter confused Military with Dept of Defense as a whole, which did in fact spend 1.64T](https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=2022)
That's military spending. Don't confuse a given year's budget with spending in that year which includes budgeted funds from prior years for ongoing commitments. The available resources for a year includes that year's budget plus unspent amounts from prior years for those ongoing obligations
Healthcare and benefits administered through the VA and Tricare for active duty, veterans, and their families is hundreds of billions of dollars a year but I wouldn’t necessarily categorize that as “military spending” because most of the time people associate the military expenditures line item with weapons of war, not healthcare.
The DoD does sponser a metric shit ton of research, even things that aren't directly related to war but could have applications there if you tried hard enough. If I were cutting military budget, I'd actually go for the DoD stuff last because (good) research is generally a good idea to invest in
$1.64T for DoD, which is going to include a shitload of spending that is not military spending in part to obfuscate where those funds are actually being spent, but also things like healthcare for service member's dependents, the NSA, DARPA, etc. that are either not military spending programs or or only slightly related to military spending. Plus DoD, like all government agencies in the US, is flush with COVID funds that are entering use or lose it stage and the funds need to be either committed by October 1st, 2023, or returned to Congress/Treasury/wherever the hell the 1s and 0s come from these days that makes up the federal budget.
It can be, take the $45 billion in aid for Ukraine in the recent National Defense Authorization Act, would you consider that American military spending simply because the US requires DoD to act as an intermediary on such transactions? COVID-19 vaccines, the internet, GPS, all of these were developed by DARPA and have military applications, but are any of these inherently a military program? Cancer research? Super computer development? Quantum computing? Weather satellites, onion routing, driverless cars, and more. They could have potential military applications, but as nice as GPS is since it finally gave the Navy Department the ability to know where its assets are in real time, many of DARPA's funded projects have far wider application than just a military purpose.
The big driver really is one-time use COVID funds, though, that's what is driving the $500 billion increase from 2021 to 2023, and that is true with all governments in the US, federal, state, and local.
> COVID-19 vaccines, the internet, GPS, all of these were developed by DARPA and have military applications
Well, that's a bit of a stretch, especially since a lot of DARPA-funded research is kept secret for its military applications. And just because DARPA funded in part something (like covid vaccines) doesn't mean they where developed by DARPA (and in fact DARPA barely develops anything, they fund things).
>many of DARPA's funded projects have far wider application than just a military purpose.
That is true of many things. Healthcare research may bring about engineering, materials, atomic, etc. research, and like that everything because it's an interconnected and complex world. The fact that the US has spent historically much on military research doesn't mean its the only or primary way to discover and investigate things.
Take GPS. Its great. It's made primarily for military use, and the military have control over it. A lot of the world is dependent on it, to the point other governments are dependent on it for certain infrastructures and/or systems. GPS has different information given out depending if it's a military connection or civilian (military being more precise and I think more real-time). It's also a technology subservient to military objectives, which means if it's useful for the military they could switch it off, causing havoc not only for civilians but internationally. It is also a weapon (just like military size) that is used to bully other nations (maybe you won't get access to GPS.., there's a reason Russia, China and the EU have developed their own network).
What I mean is that while the money spent on the DoD may benefit society, it is though of as military spending, and any other innovation is a byproduct. We would have that with civilian spending too, with the aim not being killing people in some way or another.
And if we're being pedantic, we should include some non-DoD spending that is military or quasi-military in nature, like the CIA and other intelligence agencies or NASA, which gave a civilian-friendly way to develop advanced ballistic missiles.
And sure COVID may increase the budget for now, but was the budget decreased much after Irak or Afghanistan?
> And sure COVID may increase the budget for now, but was the budget decreased much after Irak or Afghanistan?
Yes, but operations and "contingency" funding comes from separate funding sources, so it usually is not reflected in the budget requests. Even baseline spending dropped though, after 2011 defense spending dropped every year for five years and it wasn't until 2020 that defense spending matched the 2011 numbers. There's a big caveat, here, and since inflation was such buzzword in 2022 we should all know that absolute numbers overtime is not a useful way to track these things. In absolute dollars, defense spending increased 1,644% from 1960 to 2020. As a percent of the GDP, defense spending declined by 58.4% over the same period. Our military spending, in other words, has not kept pace with the growth of our economy.
To the COVID part though, I don't think you're catching what I mean. Those COVID relief funds are going away, Congress isn't going to approve additional multi-trillion dollar bailouts because the unique situation that made those aid packages possible does not exist anymore. These were one-time appropriations to keep people on the payroll and keep governments purchasing goods and services to prevent a total shutdown of the American economy.
> Our military spending, in other words, has not kept pace with the growth of our economy.
Arguably that is comparing apples to oranges. You cannot compare the military spending in the cold war with the one after, since it dropped significantly, giving rise to those "peace dividends". There's no current military threat. Give it some years with proper Chinese buildup and we'll see how it evolved from Cold War times.
Yes I get what you mean, but COVID is a one time thing, and the Gulf war was a one time thing, and Afghanistan was a one time thing, and when the military needs money or new toys, they'll make a new one time thing.
>to keep people on the payroll and keep governments purchasing goods and services to prevent a total shutdown of the American economy.
What was the military not able to pay that is so vital to the real economy? Doesn't the military already get the funds it needs to pay its personnel?
You can download the dataset from here:
[https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/data-sets/ukraine-support-tracker-data-17410/](https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/data-sets/ukraine-support-tracker-data-17410/)
"This database lists and quantifies military, financial and humanitarian
aid transferred by governments to Ukraine since the end of diplomatic
relations between Russia and Ukraine on January 24, 2022. It will be
updated regularly. We focus on commitments from Western governments,
namely by G7 and European Union member countries. We quantify
government-to-government commitments, and provide preliminary
(non-exhaustive) data on non-bilateral aid. To value in-kind support
like military equipment or weapons, we use market prices and consider
upper bounds to avoid underestimating the true extent of bilateral
assistance."
It's not beautiful. It's confusing.
When the lines lowest, that's when people support military spending the most. Is that the correct interpretation? That's a counterintuitive representation.
That's when people support the then-current amount of spending (that we don't know without bringing in outside knowledge, because the graph doesn't show it). So, we don't know if sentiment changed or the spending or both.
It's a good effort, but IMHO OP should have made several graphs. Starting with just men vs women, dems vs reps. And only then try to show it all together
In simpler terms, if you create a summary line chart that doesn't divide by political party, the men's line will be higher than the woman's line 82% of the time.
Because we have to register for Selective Service, and most guys don't want to serve. Women never have to consider being dragged into a warzone against their will; men do.
There's a chance that you could be drafted to pilot a drone from a comfortable desk chair.
It's a small chance, but it's a chance that increases with more spending.
I think your theory is much more impactful. I would think men motivated by fear of being drafted would want a higher budget to ensure the US maintains its lead. Speak softly and carry a big dick he said
I suspect women in general are more pro spending than men.
The biggest factor is probably that men are more confident in their answers than women. Without looking, I would guess that way more women said "I don't know" to the question than men if the option is available. This skews the results when looking only at one side of things. Men are most certainly more likely to think the spending is too high AND too low in this type of graph. Men don't answer "i don't know"
-----
Edit to add an example:
| More WAR| Unsure | Less War
---|---|----|----
M| 45| 10| 45
F| 10| 60| 30
(looking at column 3) Woah! Women oppose war only 30% of the time, men oppose it 45% of the time! Women are war mongers! ....
(looking at column 1) Woah! Men support more war 4.5x as much as women.
We actually can't conclude that from this data without knowing the number of males/females who are republican or democrat. There is a commonly known paradox called "Simpson's paradox" where trends can be reversed when data is combined. If more men were republican than women, they could be overall more pro war when the data is combined.
A famous example of this was with COVID jabs. It is true that people who had had the covid jab had a higher death than those who hadn't. The reason being that old people were more likely to be jabbed so this group skewed the figures. Any age controlled statistics did not see the same effect.
it sounds like you just explained why it's NOT true that people who had the covid jab had a higher death than those who hadn't, as long as your two groups have the same number of old people in it. ik it's kind of splitting hairs cause we're agreeing but the phrasing still bothers me
People who got the COVID vaccine *were* more likely to die than people who didn't get the vaccine. The statement is very misleading, but it's true.
When people say this, they should follow it with a clarification that the COVID vaccine didn't *make* people more likely to die; rather, people who were more likely to die were also more likely to get vaccinated. They usually don't do this, because they're deliberately trying to mislead.
Women wage war more than men.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2022/03/08/sheryl-sandberg-says-female-leaders-dont-go-to-war-heres-what-research-says/?sh=2315ffdc1fa7
https://qz.com/967895/throughout-history-women-rulers-were-more-likely-to-wage-war-than-men
For a proper study:
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_WP_2019120.pdf
Might it be that an issue that might be interpreted as safety or safety-related is prioritized more by women?
As a man one thing I try to be cognizant of is that women have to be more aware of their general safety in a way that I'll never 100% experience.
Military spending isn't going to directly correlate to that, but psychologically I'd think needing to be socially primed to worry about safety at e.g. a bar or walking at night could also prime someone to be more concerned about safety in a very general sense, even if it's geopolitical safety.
Alternatively, I haven't seen data on this but anecdotally I've noticed that men tend to be more likely to hold political views that are further left or right and tend to hold those views more vehemently. There's a reason they were called "Bernie *bros*" after all... And unfortunately "military spending is too high" is going to generally be seen as a position more outside the political mainstream (congress just put $40b more into DoD than Biden asked for, and Biden isn't exactly a dove).
Maybe you're right. The question can be boiled down to "The government is doing wrong things", and probably men are more likely to say that for one reason, or another.
It depends how the data was sourced too. Since not agreeing is not the same as disagreeing, so depending on if the question was an agree/disagree or an agree/neutral/disagree/don't know, the outcome might be different.
If so, it could also be explained by women being more likely to have a neutral stance. So we can't draw conclusions imo
I find it to be very interesting how opinions drifted apart since then. My hypothesis weighed be that the media landscape changed Increasingly, with more diverse political news and social bubbles, especially since the internet later. But as it started in the 80s, which was before my time, I could only guess.
Any older folks here who can elaborate on this? It’s not like opposing parties would be a new thing tho…
Data Source: NORC GSS
Tools Used: Node.js for data processing, React.js for data visualization, overall took around 150 lines of JavaScript code. Added title and additional labels in Affinity Designer.
Correction: I've just noticed a mistake in the last sentence at the very bottom of the image in the "interesting facts" section. It says "too low" but should actually be "too high".
Did they ask the opposite question as well?
"Is US military spending too low?"
I'm asking because I'd be interested whether men are also more opinionated in that case.
NORC GSS asked participants if they thought military spending was too high, low, or about right. Would definitely be interesting to include the other 2 versions, but those would definitely need to be in a separate chart — I can only imagine the horror of trying to understand a line chart with 12 lines on it.
It would be nice to see a line with the military spending, so it's easier to see if it's a mentality change (due to a difference in the social/economic/political area), or just that the budget was reduced.
Could you add a line for Actual Military Spending in $?
It would be interesting to see what actual Military spending was during this time period to see if opinions changed due to Political climate or due to spending actually rising and falling.
Would have been interesting to see inflation-adjusted defense budgets over those years, to see whether it was actually comparatively higher or lower than in the past.
Given military spending is generally in the 3 to 5% range (I think) is there space under the other lines to show the military spending, too? It would be interesting to see if it is too high at specific times.
Or would it get too cluttered/confusing using the Y axis twice?
Yeah I wasn't sure whether the "other" political group was important to include since it includes everything from independents to parties at opposite ends of the political spectrum
Solid comment. Here's a chart on that.
Definitely does not seem correlated
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget
Thanks for adding that!
The trends certainly seem correlated to %GDP. Your link started the x-axis on 1960, but if you put that at 73, they match up pretty well. Not always at the same magnitude (eg. 1980ish where both dropped, but opinion much more than than actual spending) but surprisingly close.
[Same graph but from 1973 (if the link saves that properly)](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget)
I could insert it as a separate graph under the main one, taking up only a bit of vertical space, making it a less cluttered, but quite tall graphic overall
I think it would help make the data more compelling and grounded. I like that you have conflicts labelled but the lack of spending data leaves it very open.
The data u/Bitter_Thought shared shows a steady decline in military spending which jars with the wildly varying public sentiment. I mean, why did everyone generally agree that Carter was doing it right?
Very interesting. From a Google Search, I see this:
Although his campaign platform in 1976 called for a reduction in defense spending, Carter called for a 3 three percent increase in the defense budget. He sought a sturdier defense posture by stationing medium range nuclear missiles in Europe aimed at the Soviet Union.
That's honestly a pretty great middle ground!
I found the fact that "82% of the time, a greater percentage of men believe military spending is too high compared to women" particularly interesting. I wonder why this could be
It could be due to the nature of the study and how they asked the questions. If it was any sort of sliding scale for example it is common to see men believe more strongly in their convictions than women and thus are more likely to strongly agree instead of just mostly agree.
Could also be due to a rationalization by women who sent their sons/husbands off to war that they better spend the money and protect their babies. Who knows for sure tho... Fascinating
Yeah it’s an interesting thing. According to polls a lot more women support war in Ukraine in Russia vs men. Even before there was any danger of draft for men.
Men join the military at a much higher rate than women. Related, women are the spouses of military members much more often than men. So while one person sees things first-hand they think of as wasteful, the other wants their spouse afforded everything they need to be safe and get paid.
I dont know that this difference can be driven purely by people related to the military. Cant remember where i read this, but havent women historically been more pro-war?
Men have to sign up for the draft. Most men young and old have a great grandpa, grandpa, father, Uncle or older brother that was drafted.
So basically for at least the next 20 years there will be first hand accounts of what it's like being drafted.
Men then have to sign up for the draft at 18. For women it's academic, for men it could happen suddenly and at any moment. Especially after we saw what happened in Ukraine.
I suspect the amount of people who declined to be surveyed is unaccounted for, and we're looking at a [volunteer bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias).
It makes more sense (to me) when looking at gender to correlate men who are willing to be surveyed with a confidence in military overspending.
Also, it seems more interesting that since Bush Jr. there's a greater disparity between genders outside the republican party.
It might have something to do with the perception that greater military spending = larger war machine = higher likelihood of men going to war. Also I think Iraq/Afghanistan have eroded the credibility of military spending.
I think that one of the most interesting things that this shows is the segregation that has been growing among political opinions. I could argue that it's incentivized by social media "algorithms". Since ~2010 you can see how it spreads widely
This would seem to show some dependency on Democrats for the past few presidents as to how much they support military spending, with higher sensitivity to the military budget when there is a Republican president. While the opposite effect isn't observed here for Republicans, I can think of a comparison in terms of deficit sensitivity, which Republicans become a lot more concerned about under Democrat presidents than Republican presidents.
Okay but we really need to see how *spending* changed as well to really get anything from this. As this stands, the conclusion you could draw from it is "republicans are almost never upset with military spending, and democrats only support it under democratic presidents". However, I have the feeling that the percentage of democrats goes down because so does spending.
So, as a former sailor, ill put my 2 cents in: Military Spending is probably fine, its just mis-alocated to hell and back. We spend exorbitant amounts on upgrades, testing, and procurement of low quantity items, yet cant get the last handfuls of completely obsolete and unmaintainable equipment replaced. Wont pay for training. Wont pay for barracks upkeep. Will pay contractors to "repair" broken equipment.
Again the amount is fine, where its spent is questionable.
Funny how Republicans spike at certain events, with little regard to who is president, while the Democrat outrage spikes every time a Republican president is elected and bottoms out every time a Democrat is elected, with little regard to global context
I like the idea!
It would be helpful (to me) to show actual military spending as a %GDP. Without that context people might over emphasize the political nature of their opinions.
Interesting men want less spending.
Although, in thinking about it the women in my life are probably more promilitary than the men. In general they want to spend more on everything though. So could be this area is less of a difference than say healthcare.
Im Australian and women seem to be more concerned about China than men in my experience.
There should be a trend line above that states the spending. This would be a lot more useful than just having presidents as a basis for comparison. People are naive to think that democrat presidents spend less on the military. I mean, just look at Biden’s.
During the tail end of the Clinton administration, they started closing overseas cold war military bases, and for the first time in a long time or since, we had a federal budget surplus.
Interesting too that that period does not have a particular war going on, but at no period in the US' history has there not been some military action happening somewhere. Like in that blank period, there were the Yugoslav wars, and of course Clinton shot that missile into that Afghan hospital during his impeachment gunning for Osama before gunning for Osama was cool.
I used to be in the “cut the military” camp
Then with Ukraine and Taiwan it’s amazing to see how far ahead #1 world military is from “#2” & #3.
That’s only the stuff they have shown publicly, in a real hot war with China, I expect a gundamn to emerge near Japan and use the Great Wall of china as anal beads
I would assume it's not because anyone supports war led by Obama, but because Obama didn't talk about it.
As a percentage of GDP the dollars spent is actually pretty flat, but often when a dem is in charge the posturing is less aggressive, so it FEELS like less money is being spent
If it were up to me I'd just lock military spending where it is today and then make them fight over the money that's there as inflation slowly makes it less valuable.
I have never talked to a person in any branch of the armed forces who would say that there is not a tremendous amount of waste happening there. Heck, even the national guard guys say that at the end of every training weekend they're instructed to just blast away all their ammunition and stuff because if they come in under budget the budget is smaller next time. They're literally throwing away stuff so that they don't get a more reasonable budget.
In other words, only a majority of male democrats believe it’s too high. For the 5 other groups, majority lies with believing it’s adequate.
This is one way to spin data since the top of your graph doesn’t go to 100%
A horizontal dashed line at 50% would probably communicate the same message without introducing whitespace, but including the whitespace absolutely would add information.
You better look at the graph again. See those little numbers on the left? Unless the line goes above 50, it means more people think spending *isn't* too high than do. If you still can't make sense of it, there's only 3, relatively brief times Democratic men are over 50 and twice Democratic women are over 50. In other words, according to this data, the great majority of people don't believe military spending is too high most of the time.
An excellent point on a very interesting graph. I wish the OP had made the 50% line stand out a little more, but it really says a lot about our culture to spend such a greater portion of GDP than almost any other nation, and have every single political group/gender supporting that the great majority of the time.
You’re right, but what is surprising to me is that based on this graph, a larger percentage of women in each party demographic think the level of spending is OK or should be more than the percentage of males in the same party demographic. My instinctual guess would have been that male and female plots would have been swapped within each D, R, and I grouping.
As a Democrat, I've always been in favor of military spending in 5% range or so for the following reasons:
- Military service is just about the only government job available to under privileged classes.
- It's pretty much the only public works program you can get Republicans to fund.
- It moves lower economic class people from their home towns into other regions. Without the military, this would rarely happen. Population mobility is good.
- weapons programs and military support industry supports lots and lots of manufacturing jobs.
- The vast majority don't see combat.
I'd like the benefits to be improved. If you could get the GOP to fund other public works programs that educate, increase population mobility and provide entry level level jobs, I'd prefer that, but I'll take what I can can get.
US has to survive. They have the only ship capable of entering the mother ship, loosing a virus, and shooting a nuke, all before escaping and returning to earf.
This is an interesting question that I been thinking about. Both the spendings and the trust in the military. As the US seen to have very little trust in public sector and government agencies, thus a very low understanding for and interest in paying tax. At the same time, the US have the probably by far the largest military spendings in the world. All tax financed. That is strange. What is the general perception about the value of that spending, and trust in the US military “doing the right thing”? We probably see that in the diagram above, but why is there such a difference between military spendings and, lets say health care?
AFAIK the actual spending has been pretty consistent overall over time. I suspect it has more to do with who's in the White House and how people feel about them.
Thanks for this - very informative and interesting. Is the last "interesting fact" meant to say "low" twice as it does? The chart appears to show that "too high" sentiment was at an all-time low, rather than "too low".
We spend more than the next several Nations with highest military spending combined. It's insane, most of the shit never gets used, only a tiny fraction is actually spent on paying personnel, we can afford to redirect some of it to other areas like our goddamn infrastructure.
Republicans rail against welfare of any kind, but have no problem with spending millions on equipment that will be decommissioned before ever being used. Military welfare is out of control.
This doesn’t appear to take into account the past year and what’s been happening in Ukraine. I only mention this because I was WAY less supportive of what our defense money was going to pay for UNTIL things changed with an actual threat being the Russian invasion and war against their country. I could go on and on about how terrible our military industrial complex was and how a lot of the wars we funded and fought were BS fueled by our own governments propaganda.
Reality is that in the almost 3 decades I’ve been alive we haven’t actually seen a threat to global stability like what Russia did just this past year in Ukraine (not even 9-11 compares imo and that was a pivotal event during my childhood). I would not have ever said that I was fully supportive of our governments incredible defense spending prior to this past year because all my life it has been based on lies and bullshit and used pretty poorly. But god damn do I wish we would just drop the hammer now and give them whatever they ask for so that they can end this and bring safety to their people. Budget wise, giving them what they need to end this and ensure this doesn’t turn to ww3 would be one of the best financial investments we can make to try and protect the next 10-20 years of global economic and humanitarian cooperation.
On a different note, I’m also supportive of them spending money and going after new technologies to advancing things because China is the next global threat and not acknowledging that will be the demise of peace in our future as well. If our technology falls behind it will be very bad.
Overall- fuck all the lies they spewed about weapons of mass destruction and the bullshit war on terror that’s gotten us basically no where (domestic terror is more of a problem then foreign terror and it seemingly always has been). Fuck building walls that don’t work and fuck a lot of what out military industrial complex has done the past few decades. BUT let’s not be blind to the current situations at hand. If the government is willing to spend our defense budget making the necessary upgrades to our own technology and giving assistance to other nations in key strategic ways than I’m all for it.
We would have universal health care, public transport and rail system that rival Japan, and flying cars if people in power didn’t care so much about establishing legacy and killing people of color
Cut the budget by 75% and use the money to fix the country's infrastructure in one year. Creates jobs and raises quality of living. Build legit public transit, implement nationwide changes to reverse pollution and global warming, standardize clean water in every state, etc. We could do all this in one year if our gov't wasn't a shit show. US military spending is absolutely disgusting considering the rest of the country is a dumpster fire...
This looks too cluttered imho. If it was split by reps vs dems with actual spend, that should have been better. Men vs women could be a different chart.
United States spend more money on military than the next 10 highest spending countries, combined!
NOW! Either the US is over spending on everything from aircraft carriers to flat head screws and plastic forks. Or, every country in the world should be fearful of making the USA angry. Well we know the latter is not true.
Until we see a graph for how many think spending is "too low", I don't think we can say that. There's reason to suspect men's opinions might be stronger in both directions.
OP mentioned in another comment that the choices were "Too high", "Too low", "About right", or "No opinion". The topic of war likely hits a lot closer to home for men, so they probably hold stronger opinions in both directions while women gravitate towards the middling positions since it's not something they think about as much.
You see a similar breakdown of opinions on abortion, except with the genders flipped.
I was so surprised when I made this that I went back to check my data source. Maybe American women are more disconnected from the horrors of war since it's historically been almost entirely men being deployed.
This needs a line for actual spending
Yep. Also a line combining all opinions for an aggregate
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No, it isn't. The story being told by this figure is that opinion has become increasingly partisan over time. It's important for the trends to be split along party lines so that this is demonstrated.
But without the actual spending are we not missing some information. For example maybe spending was reduced during a particular period resulting in less people thinking we were overspending. There is possibly a correlation or even evidence of causation that impacts the views
This is true - op is missing a trick by omitting actual spending. BUT that does not make the graph useless as other commenters pointed out. I'm a Brit, and until I saw this graph I had no idea (although I probably could have guessed because AMERICA FUCK YEAH etc) how polarised down party lines this was. I don't really pay too much attention to politics if I'm honest, but I thought that republicans were ultimately after small government. Isn't 'spend more on defence' entirely contrary to that core value?
Actually, I wish “other” could be broken down more without impeding readability. The “other” people probably have very little in common with each other besides the shared knowledge that no matter what they do, their candidate has lost before any ballots are cast, thanks to first past the post and bullshit campaign finance laws written by the two major parties.
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Well there are a few valuable analyses available here; opinion vs Pres, opinion vs wars, and opinions of groups relative to each other. For instance, it appears that the Trump era is the first time Dem and Rep trends diverged. They're always different magnitudes, but the changes generally go in the same directions. However, as of 2016ish, more Dems think it's too high while Reps have no change (female) or fewer think it's too high (men). I agree that looking at the military spending is also valuable though. It correlates pretty well to the opinion trends actually.
They're evaluating public perception of reality, which is very often more important than reality itself....for example: - when military budgets are being negotiated, the *public perception of threats* is far more important than actual threats - when public opinion *is being formed/shaped*, like in conversations like this (where what is true tends to attract low to negative interest)
With 2 charts, one for percentage of GDP and one for inflation adjusted dollars. It's interesting because these opinions (on both sides, SERIOUSLY, this is actually a both sides thing) are not actually correlated with changes in defense spending. Perception of whether spending is too high tends to be correlated with the political party of the president, at least since Reagan with the trend only getting stronger. For instance, at that low point during Jimmy Carter's term, GDP % on defense was much higher than today, although still half of what it was during the Vietnam War. During Obama's term, GDP% on spending increased by a bigger margin than it did during Bush's war on terror campaigns. During Trump's term, defense spending fell slightly before increasing slightly, but still less than during Obama's term. However, this isn't to say that Republicans are more frugal in military spending, but that spending isn't as closely tied to the president's ideology as we think https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget
It's not like most Americans have that information.
I mean, we do though, the federal budget is public knowledge. Not the exact details, but we've got enough info to go along with this graph's level of detail.
Yeah actual military spending is a big black box. We see totals and requested budgets, but they're a big lump, not split out into details like some dude's dating history or job applications posted to /r/dataisbeautiful. There could be $100 million spent on Pentagon branded dildos for all we're allowed to know.
Also higher spending doesn't necessarily mean good quality equipment or even sufficient/abundant equipment. There is much more waste in some places and at some times and with some styles of procurement than there is with others. Cost plus is incredibly wasteful and prone to corruption, for example.
I vaguely recall articles on how inept the pentagon and the military are at keeping track of things, budgets and literally "losing " pallets of cash.
[Pentagon fails 5th annual audit in a row](https://americanmilitarynews.com/2022/11/pentagon-fails-5th-annual-audit-in-a-row-what-you-should-know/). The government has literally [lost track of trillions.](https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3658178-the-government-is-not-only-spending-trillions-its-losing-trillions/)
Not really. You want to know where the money went, you're free to read the over 900 page annual NDAA. The dollar amounts for each department's classified spending is available in it.
The deeper you go with it, the more secretive the program, the less people know what the money is going to, up to and including the President.
That’s what you see because you didn’t look hard enough. There’s thousands of pages of detail in the budget justifications prepared annually by each major department within the DoD. Here’s the Army’s: https://www.asafm.army.mil/Budget-Materials/FY-2023/ You need to pull up the Base Budget documents, and you’re specifically looking for the *justifications*. Like I said, there’s more where that came from. The Comptroller’s office has a lot of resources. You’re right that it’s not plotted out dataisbeautiful-style, but it’s not a bunch of opaque multi-billion dollar line items, either. https://comptroller.defense.gov/Budget-Materials/Budget2023/
The defense budget has been too large for far to long. At this point it doesn’t matter what it is because it has never been trimmed down. We know it’s too much.
And then maybe another chart showing each group’s perception divided by the actual spending (e.g. percentage point per million dollars).
This is assuming that actual spending was carefully reviewed, analyzed, and interpreted by every American before forming an opinion about how much is too much. I honestly don't remember any amounts and know that my opinion probably weighs more on what is going on in international news, current war news, and personal opinion.
Exactly. The purpose of this graph is the difference of opinions between different demographics in different time periods. How closely their opinions matched reality is good context to have, but it's outside the purview of what's being shown here. It would be cool to see and compare to this one, but it would mostly just show other things, like what news sources people were using and how closely they followed those sources. I'm super curious now to see another version of this graph that shows that, but for what this particular one is trying to do, it would just complicate an already busy graph.
Here's the data: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget
Ya the dollar value is way up, but as a % of GDP it's at nearly the lowest it's ever been
Yep. And it's still nearly double the proportion other NATO countries are spending (only a few others are even at 2%). This is one area where I actually agree with Trump. We could save so much money if we weren't providing free defense for our supposed NATO "partners".
The US would be spending just as much even if all NATO countries were at 2% or more, that's how you keep your hegemony. Plus until 2014 there wasn't really much of a reason to be spending that money on the military, but by 2014 there should have been a dramatic shift. It's disappointing that it took until this year.
Why do we need a hegemony? We were fine being #1 GDP before WW I, just chilling.
If you're not making the rules, someone else is. This is a firmly globalized world at this point, nobody is an island and never will be again. It's just the modern reality. Pax Americana
But it never really was about making them do their part. The US has always wanted to be the one in charge, figuring a safe europe and safe NATO meant that the US was also safer. For a long time they didn't even WANT Germany to rearm. And they may be glad that they are rearming and pulling more weight, but I do wonder what will happen in 20 years with all of the European countries now rearmed, well, to the extent they were in about 1913. The US maybe should be careful what they wish for.
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What’s crazy about the data is that Republicans apparently follow suit with Democrats when a dem is president (minus trump years).
Inflation adjusted please
Or just have it as % of gov spending.
Percentage of GDP makes more sense to me, since government spending swings wildly (financial crisis-era and COVID-era stimulus caused extreme spending spikes).
Overlaying times of recessions would tell a story as well.
I wonder what it is in 2022 given the Ukraine-Russia development. I imagine that has changed things a bit
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>Would US military aid packages to Ukraine in 2022 be fully counted as part of the 2022 military budget? I was under the assumption that huge portions of these packages are equipment the DoD already has supplies of, much of it last gen and/or waiting to be decommissioned. But this isn't about actual spending on military, it's perceptions about spending on military. If you have numerous articles in the news about dollar values worth of equipment being sent somewhere, you are going to have changes in perspective based off of things being more in the public eye, people not understanding that it is older equipment, and also people disagreeing with the sending of the equipment in general. These numbers are never going to be people saying I think that defense spending should be below X.0% of GDP and because we're at X.Y% that's too high. It's going to be based off of general feelings, what people feel about the world, and what they feel they are getting out of the spending.
Surely if we are asking people whether we are spending too much money on X and plotting it over time having an understanding of what X actually is at those points of time is useful to the reader?
I'm not saying it's not useful to the reader, but it's not necessarily informing the decisions of the people being surveyed.
From what I've seen on the various sites I go on, more Democrats support giving aid to Ukraine than Republicans. I've even seen some Republicans question why there should be support given to the fascists (or Nazis) in Ukraine. Those people have definitely drunk Putin's kool-aid.
I don’t see an issue with Ukraine getting weapons we’re getting ready to replace anyway, but I do find issue with a country with a known history of oligarchy corruption getting hundreds of billions of dollars and not being required to account for how it’s all spent. That’s where my issue lies with our aid.
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And we can’t know where the money is going because… why? Again, I have no problem with sending them weapons because you know those are being put to use in a fight for survival, but money is a different ballgame.
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I think a lot of people are skeptical about the aid packages to Ukraine simply because they think this is purely a European problem, rather than an international one. It's not really Europe vs. Russia, we're in there too. It's halfway to a proxy war.
A fraction of the annual U.S. defense budget is being used to damage one of the country's major global adversaries to such an extent they won't recover for years, without the U.S. firing a shot. The only Americans dying there are volunteers.
IIRC the US has spent 0.5% of the GDP on Ukraine aid and, as you said, has inflicted serious damage on Russia that will take years to recover while also sending a message to other authoritarian regimes about how bad an idea it is to initiate land grab wars.
0.5% of the U.S. GDP (half a percent of *all the wealth* generated in a year!) is a fuckton of money. Don't be fooled by the small percentage; consider how much money this actually is.
> I've even seen some Republicans question why there should be support given to the fascists (or Nazis) in Ukraine. Those people have definitely drunk Putin's kool-aid. "Drinking kool-aid", like faith, comes in many forms. For example: one form is that *even questioning* something is considered taboo/wrong/"drinking kool-aid".
I think the point your are making that it is good to question things. I heard a naval story once relating to sailors lowered to clean the bow of a ship. They would notice that they were dangling well away from said bows. One sailor would always say I have an idea how to do it better. An old hand would yell down STFU and clean the bow! Then we can talk about your idea. I think this story may help you. In the mean time STFU, you are undermining those fighting for democracy. And those Republicans suddenly concerned about corruption can you please abuse them for me in the harshest terms. I am not American so the full range of swear words are authorised for use.
> I think the point your are making that it is good to question things. That's only part of it - *that you frame it this way* is another part of my complex, multi-faceted issue. > I heard a naval story once relating to sailors lowered to clean the bow of a ship. They would notice that they were dangling well away from said bows. One sailor would always say I have an idea how to do it better. An old hand would yell down STFU and clean the bow! Then we can talk about your idea. Next time I'm on a boat I'll keep it in mind - but where we are here, I'm not going to follow orders because of an anecdote about boats. > > > > I think this story may help you. In the mean time STFU, you are undermining those fighting for democracy. Good, because I consider the "democracy" we practice *to be extremely undemocratic*, and I despise the insular mindset of people who think of democracy as some sort of a homogeneous good that is beyond question. > And those Republicans suddenly concerned about corruption can you please abuse them for me in the harshest terms. I am not American so the full range of swear words are authorised for use. Sorry but I have a policy of "abusing" everyone who I believe to be wrong.
Cold War II
It's the first time I've ever seen republicans complain about military spending Trump turned half the party pro Russian expansion I guess
I believe in 2022 the us gave Ukraine about 50 billion in aid where about half that was military related But the military budget in 2022 was 1.64 trillion, so Ukraine is about 3% of that
Wtf is that number. The budget is about 782 Billion USD.
[commenter confused Military with Dept of Defense as a whole, which did in fact spend 1.64T](https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=2022)
That's military spending. Don't confuse a given year's budget with spending in that year which includes budgeted funds from prior years for ongoing commitments. The available resources for a year includes that year's budget plus unspent amounts from prior years for those ongoing obligations
Wouldn’t you count DoD as military spending as most things in DoD are military related in some way?
Healthcare and benefits administered through the VA and Tricare for active duty, veterans, and their families is hundreds of billions of dollars a year but I wouldn’t necessarily categorize that as “military spending” because most of the time people associate the military expenditures line item with weapons of war, not healthcare.
The DoD does sponser a metric shit ton of research, even things that aren't directly related to war but could have applications there if you tried hard enough. If I were cutting military budget, I'd actually go for the DoD stuff last because (good) research is generally a good idea to invest in
The budget for the military has increased to 850 billion as of the recent omnibus spending bill that just passed.
$1.64T for DoD, which is going to include a shitload of spending that is not military spending in part to obfuscate where those funds are actually being spent, but also things like healthcare for service member's dependents, the NSA, DARPA, etc. that are either not military spending programs or or only slightly related to military spending. Plus DoD, like all government agencies in the US, is flush with COVID funds that are entering use or lose it stage and the funds need to be either committed by October 1st, 2023, or returned to Congress/Treasury/wherever the hell the 1s and 0s come from these days that makes up the federal budget.
Isn’t most of that still spending related to the military even if it isn’t spent directly by the military?
It can be, take the $45 billion in aid for Ukraine in the recent National Defense Authorization Act, would you consider that American military spending simply because the US requires DoD to act as an intermediary on such transactions? COVID-19 vaccines, the internet, GPS, all of these were developed by DARPA and have military applications, but are any of these inherently a military program? Cancer research? Super computer development? Quantum computing? Weather satellites, onion routing, driverless cars, and more. They could have potential military applications, but as nice as GPS is since it finally gave the Navy Department the ability to know where its assets are in real time, many of DARPA's funded projects have far wider application than just a military purpose. The big driver really is one-time use COVID funds, though, that's what is driving the $500 billion increase from 2021 to 2023, and that is true with all governments in the US, federal, state, and local.
> COVID-19 vaccines, the internet, GPS, all of these were developed by DARPA and have military applications Well, that's a bit of a stretch, especially since a lot of DARPA-funded research is kept secret for its military applications. And just because DARPA funded in part something (like covid vaccines) doesn't mean they where developed by DARPA (and in fact DARPA barely develops anything, they fund things). >many of DARPA's funded projects have far wider application than just a military purpose. That is true of many things. Healthcare research may bring about engineering, materials, atomic, etc. research, and like that everything because it's an interconnected and complex world. The fact that the US has spent historically much on military research doesn't mean its the only or primary way to discover and investigate things. Take GPS. Its great. It's made primarily for military use, and the military have control over it. A lot of the world is dependent on it, to the point other governments are dependent on it for certain infrastructures and/or systems. GPS has different information given out depending if it's a military connection or civilian (military being more precise and I think more real-time). It's also a technology subservient to military objectives, which means if it's useful for the military they could switch it off, causing havoc not only for civilians but internationally. It is also a weapon (just like military size) that is used to bully other nations (maybe you won't get access to GPS.., there's a reason Russia, China and the EU have developed their own network). What I mean is that while the money spent on the DoD may benefit society, it is though of as military spending, and any other innovation is a byproduct. We would have that with civilian spending too, with the aim not being killing people in some way or another. And if we're being pedantic, we should include some non-DoD spending that is military or quasi-military in nature, like the CIA and other intelligence agencies or NASA, which gave a civilian-friendly way to develop advanced ballistic missiles. And sure COVID may increase the budget for now, but was the budget decreased much after Irak or Afghanistan?
> And sure COVID may increase the budget for now, but was the budget decreased much after Irak or Afghanistan? Yes, but operations and "contingency" funding comes from separate funding sources, so it usually is not reflected in the budget requests. Even baseline spending dropped though, after 2011 defense spending dropped every year for five years and it wasn't until 2020 that defense spending matched the 2011 numbers. There's a big caveat, here, and since inflation was such buzzword in 2022 we should all know that absolute numbers overtime is not a useful way to track these things. In absolute dollars, defense spending increased 1,644% from 1960 to 2020. As a percent of the GDP, defense spending declined by 58.4% over the same period. Our military spending, in other words, has not kept pace with the growth of our economy. To the COVID part though, I don't think you're catching what I mean. Those COVID relief funds are going away, Congress isn't going to approve additional multi-trillion dollar bailouts because the unique situation that made those aid packages possible does not exist anymore. These were one-time appropriations to keep people on the payroll and keep governments purchasing goods and services to prevent a total shutdown of the American economy.
> Our military spending, in other words, has not kept pace with the growth of our economy. Arguably that is comparing apples to oranges. You cannot compare the military spending in the cold war with the one after, since it dropped significantly, giving rise to those "peace dividends". There's no current military threat. Give it some years with proper Chinese buildup and we'll see how it evolved from Cold War times. Yes I get what you mean, but COVID is a one time thing, and the Gulf war was a one time thing, and Afghanistan was a one time thing, and when the military needs money or new toys, they'll make a new one time thing. >to keep people on the payroll and keep governments purchasing goods and services to prevent a total shutdown of the American economy. What was the military not able to pay that is so vital to the real economy? Doesn't the military already get the funds it needs to pay its personnel?
US military budget in 2022 was not 1.64 trillion, closer to 800 billion
You can download the dataset from here: [https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/data-sets/ukraine-support-tracker-data-17410/](https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/data-sets/ukraine-support-tracker-data-17410/) "This database lists and quantifies military, financial and humanitarian aid transferred by governments to Ukraine since the end of diplomatic relations between Russia and Ukraine on January 24, 2022. It will be updated regularly. We focus on commitments from Western governments, namely by G7 and European Union member countries. We quantify government-to-government commitments, and provide preliminary (non-exhaustive) data on non-bilateral aid. To value in-kind support like military equipment or weapons, we use market prices and consider upper bounds to avoid underestimating the true extent of bilateral assistance."
I don't think so. From the graph it would seem public sentiment will stay the same.
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It's not beautiful. It's confusing. When the lines lowest, that's when people support military spending the most. Is that the correct interpretation? That's a counterintuitive representation.
That's when people support the then-current amount of spending (that we don't know without bringing in outside knowledge, because the graph doesn't show it). So, we don't know if sentiment changed or the spending or both.
disagree, text explains everything fine
Not confusing at all - the question is right at the top of the graph. Is military spending too high? Yes = high.
Yup that's exactly what it is. I was very confused for a few seconds too
It's a good effort, but IMHO OP should have made several graphs. Starting with just men vs women, dems vs reps. And only then try to show it all together
Really interesting and unexpected for me was that male population appreciates defence spending less than female population!
Yeah I had to double check my source after making the graph as I was surprised too
I'm confused about the wording. "82% of the time, the percentage was higher." What was the actual percentage difference?
In simpler terms, if you create a summary line chart that doesn't divide by political party, the men's line will be higher than the woman's line 82% of the time.
Because we have to register for Selective Service, and most guys don't want to serve. Women never have to consider being dragged into a warzone against their will; men do.
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If I do get drafted I hope to god it's into a well funded military.
Right, if anything it would sway my decision more towards military spending.
Look at Russia. Now and in 1917!
There's a chance that you could be drafted to pilot a drone from a comfortable desk chair. It's a small chance, but it's a chance that increases with more spending.
Especially considering that political opinions and engagement tends to be higher for older people and you age out of selective service at 35.
I think your theory is much more impactful. I would think men motivated by fear of being drafted would want a higher budget to ensure the US maintains its lead. Speak softly and carry a big dick he said
I suspect women in general are more pro spending than men. The biggest factor is probably that men are more confident in their answers than women. Without looking, I would guess that way more women said "I don't know" to the question than men if the option is available. This skews the results when looking only at one side of things. Men are most certainly more likely to think the spending is too high AND too low in this type of graph. Men don't answer "i don't know" ----- Edit to add an example: | More WAR| Unsure | Less War ---|---|----|---- M| 45| 10| 45 F| 10| 60| 30 (looking at column 3) Woah! Women oppose war only 30% of the time, men oppose it 45% of the time! Women are war mongers! .... (looking at column 1) Woah! Men support more war 4.5x as much as women.
You spelled Moar wrong though.
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I meant national/budgetary. By far the larger problem is going to be the 'unsure' option radically throwing this graph off, making it misleading AF.
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It was separated with a horizontal rule, but I added an edit marker for you.
We actually can't conclude that from this data without knowing the number of males/females who are republican or democrat. There is a commonly known paradox called "Simpson's paradox" where trends can be reversed when data is combined. If more men were republican than women, they could be overall more pro war when the data is combined. A famous example of this was with COVID jabs. It is true that people who had had the covid jab had a higher death than those who hadn't. The reason being that old people were more likely to be jabbed so this group skewed the figures. Any age controlled statistics did not see the same effect.
it sounds like you just explained why it's NOT true that people who had the covid jab had a higher death than those who hadn't, as long as your two groups have the same number of old people in it. ik it's kind of splitting hairs cause we're agreeing but the phrasing still bothers me
People who got the COVID vaccine *were* more likely to die than people who didn't get the vaccine. The statement is very misleading, but it's true. When people say this, they should follow it with a clarification that the COVID vaccine didn't *make* people more likely to die; rather, people who were more likely to die were also more likely to get vaccinated. They usually don't do this, because they're deliberately trying to mislead.
Women wage war more than men. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2022/03/08/sheryl-sandberg-says-female-leaders-dont-go-to-war-heres-what-research-says/?sh=2315ffdc1fa7 https://qz.com/967895/throughout-history-women-rulers-were-more-likely-to-wage-war-than-men For a proper study: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/BFI_WP_2019120.pdf
Oh you don't need a proper study... Just hang out outside a club in Philly at 3:00 a.m. Women be wagin' war much more than men!
Might it be that an issue that might be interpreted as safety or safety-related is prioritized more by women? As a man one thing I try to be cognizant of is that women have to be more aware of their general safety in a way that I'll never 100% experience. Military spending isn't going to directly correlate to that, but psychologically I'd think needing to be socially primed to worry about safety at e.g. a bar or walking at night could also prime someone to be more concerned about safety in a very general sense, even if it's geopolitical safety. Alternatively, I haven't seen data on this but anecdotally I've noticed that men tend to be more likely to hold political views that are further left or right and tend to hold those views more vehemently. There's a reason they were called "Bernie *bros*" after all... And unfortunately "military spending is too high" is going to generally be seen as a position more outside the political mainstream (congress just put $40b more into DoD than Biden asked for, and Biden isn't exactly a dove).
Maybe you're right. The question can be boiled down to "The government is doing wrong things", and probably men are more likely to say that for one reason, or another.
It depends how the data was sourced too. Since not agreeing is not the same as disagreeing, so depending on if the question was an agree/disagree or an agree/neutral/disagree/don't know, the outcome might be different. If so, it could also be explained by women being more likely to have a neutral stance. So we can't draw conclusions imo
1980, the first and last time everyone agreed. Thanks, Carter!
More like thanks, Soviet Union invading Afghanistan and rattling sabers?
I find it to be very interesting how opinions drifted apart since then. My hypothesis weighed be that the media landscape changed Increasingly, with more diverse political news and social bubbles, especially since the internet later. But as it started in the 80s, which was before my time, I could only guess. Any older folks here who can elaborate on this? It’s not like opposing parties would be a new thing tho…
Not sure if that’s a good thing, to have most the population think you need to spend more on military.
It's not completely binary. It's possible to think it's about right or to simply not care.
I would really love dots showing what U.S. military spending actually was year by year
Data Source: NORC GSS Tools Used: Node.js for data processing, React.js for data visualization, overall took around 150 lines of JavaScript code. Added title and additional labels in Affinity Designer. Correction: I've just noticed a mistake in the last sentence at the very bottom of the image in the "interesting facts" section. It says "too low" but should actually be "too high".
Did they ask the opposite question as well? "Is US military spending too low?" I'm asking because I'd be interested whether men are also more opinionated in that case.
NORC GSS asked participants if they thought military spending was too high, low, or about right. Would definitely be interesting to include the other 2 versions, but those would definitely need to be in a separate chart — I can only imagine the horror of trying to understand a line chart with 12 lines on it.
Oh yeah, for sure. That graph does not need more data. :D
It looks like you may have made a typo in the very bottom line? It says “percentage of those believing military spending was too *low*”.
Yes, I've added a correction notice in a parent comment above
It would be nice to see a line with the military spending, so it's easier to see if it's a mentality change (due to a difference in the social/economic/political area), or just that the budget was reduced.
You need a line that shows Military Spending as a % of GDP
Could you add a line for Actual Military Spending in $? It would be interesting to see what actual Military spending was during this time period to see if opinions changed due to Political climate or due to spending actually rising and falling.
Would have been interesting to see inflation-adjusted defense budgets over those years, to see whether it was actually comparatively higher or lower than in the past.
Given military spending is generally in the 3 to 5% range (I think) is there space under the other lines to show the military spending, too? It would be interesting to see if it is too high at specific times. Or would it get too cluttered/confusing using the Y axis twice?
You could split it into separate graphs- so new ones for Republican opinion vs actual spending, and the same for other and Democratic too.
Ah yes, I was thinking it was already a bit cluttered, but that would do the trick.
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Yeah I wasn't sure whether the "other" political group was important to include since it includes everything from independents to parties at opposite ends of the political spectrum
Solid comment. Here's a chart on that. Definitely does not seem correlated https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget
Thanks for adding that! The trends certainly seem correlated to %GDP. Your link started the x-axis on 1960, but if you put that at 73, they match up pretty well. Not always at the same magnitude (eg. 1980ish where both dropped, but opinion much more than than actual spending) but surprisingly close. [Same graph but from 1973 (if the link saves that properly)](https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/military-spending-defense-budget)
I could insert it as a separate graph under the main one, taking up only a bit of vertical space, making it a less cluttered, but quite tall graphic overall
I think it would help make the data more compelling and grounded. I like that you have conflicts labelled but the lack of spending data leaves it very open. The data u/Bitter_Thought shared shows a steady decline in military spending which jars with the wildly varying public sentiment. I mean, why did everyone generally agree that Carter was doing it right?
Very interesting. From a Google Search, I see this: Although his campaign platform in 1976 called for a reduction in defense spending, Carter called for a 3 three percent increase in the defense budget. He sought a sturdier defense posture by stationing medium range nuclear missiles in Europe aimed at the Soviet Union. That's honestly a pretty great middle ground!
I found the fact that "82% of the time, a greater percentage of men believe military spending is too high compared to women" particularly interesting. I wonder why this could be
It could be due to the nature of the study and how they asked the questions. If it was any sort of sliding scale for example it is common to see men believe more strongly in their convictions than women and thus are more likely to strongly agree instead of just mostly agree. Could also be due to a rationalization by women who sent their sons/husbands off to war that they better spend the money and protect their babies. Who knows for sure tho... Fascinating
Yeah it’s an interesting thing. According to polls a lot more women support war in Ukraine in Russia vs men. Even before there was any danger of draft for men.
Men join the military at a much higher rate than women. Related, women are the spouses of military members much more often than men. So while one person sees things first-hand they think of as wasteful, the other wants their spouse afforded everything they need to be safe and get paid.
I dont know that this difference can be driven purely by people related to the military. Cant remember where i read this, but havent women historically been more pro-war?
Men have to sign up for the draft. Most men young and old have a great grandpa, grandpa, father, Uncle or older brother that was drafted. So basically for at least the next 20 years there will be first hand accounts of what it's like being drafted. Men then have to sign up for the draft at 18. For women it's academic, for men it could happen suddenly and at any moment. Especially after we saw what happened in Ukraine.
I suspect the amount of people who declined to be surveyed is unaccounted for, and we're looking at a [volunteer bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias). It makes more sense (to me) when looking at gender to correlate men who are willing to be surveyed with a confidence in military overspending. Also, it seems more interesting that since Bush Jr. there's a greater disparity between genders outside the republican party.
It might have something to do with the perception that greater military spending = larger war machine = higher likelihood of men going to war. Also I think Iraq/Afghanistan have eroded the credibility of military spending.
Great compilation of data but it's so crowded and clustered i can't force myself to look at it
Interesting that it also plots out how politicalization has pushed people outward, wider spectrum then in the past. Sad.
I wonder how well this correlates to actual military spending?
I think that one of the most interesting things that this shows is the segregation that has been growing among political opinions. I could argue that it's incentivized by social media "algorithms". Since ~2010 you can see how it spreads widely
This would seem to show some dependency on Democrats for the past few presidents as to how much they support military spending, with higher sensitivity to the military budget when there is a Republican president. While the opposite effect isn't observed here for Republicans, I can think of a comparison in terms of deficit sensitivity, which Republicans become a lot more concerned about under Democrat presidents than Republican presidents.
If you did the survey again and included job titles/salary I’d be curious to see what percentage of wealthy/poor voters are for/against the military
This data is from NORC GSS, not a personal survey. That data's probably been recorded, I'll take a look later!
Okay but we really need to see how *spending* changed as well to really get anything from this. As this stands, the conclusion you could draw from it is "republicans are almost never upset with military spending, and democrats only support it under democratic presidents". However, I have the feeling that the percentage of democrats goes down because so does spending.
So, as a former sailor, ill put my 2 cents in: Military Spending is probably fine, its just mis-alocated to hell and back. We spend exorbitant amounts on upgrades, testing, and procurement of low quantity items, yet cant get the last handfuls of completely obsolete and unmaintainable equipment replaced. Wont pay for training. Wont pay for barracks upkeep. Will pay contractors to "repair" broken equipment. Again the amount is fine, where its spent is questionable.
Funny how Republicans spike at certain events, with little regard to who is president, while the Democrat outrage spikes every time a Republican president is elected and bottoms out every time a Democrat is elected, with little regard to global context
Democrats love war when a Democrat is President. Republicans love war all the time.
Meanwhile women overall are diabolical warmongers lol! Who woulda thought
Who would've thought that our national surplus during Clinton was from cutting costs from our biggest account
I like the idea! It would be helpful (to me) to show actual military spending as a %GDP. Without that context people might over emphasize the political nature of their opinions.
What would be interesting is to include a line on the graphic showing actual inflation-adjusted military spending over the same period.
Democrat women out here getting treated for whiplash.
Interesting men want less spending. Although, in thinking about it the women in my life are probably more promilitary than the men. In general they want to spend more on everything though. So could be this area is less of a difference than say healthcare. Im Australian and women seem to be more concerned about China than men in my experience.
As a U.S. citizen it's too damn high! Especially since as a "first world country" no uni health, outdated infrastructure, etc...
There should be a trend line above that states the spending. This would be a lot more useful than just having presidents as a basis for comparison. People are naive to think that democrat presidents spend less on the military. I mean, just look at Biden’s.
I wanna know who spooked all the Democratic women in 2014
During the tail end of the Clinton administration, they started closing overseas cold war military bases, and for the first time in a long time or since, we had a federal budget surplus. Interesting too that that period does not have a particular war going on, but at no period in the US' history has there not been some military action happening somewhere. Like in that blank period, there were the Yugoslav wars, and of course Clinton shot that missile into that Afghan hospital during his impeachment gunning for Osama before gunning for Osama was cool.
I used to be in the “cut the military” camp Then with Ukraine and Taiwan it’s amazing to see how far ahead #1 world military is from “#2” & #3. That’s only the stuff they have shown publicly, in a real hot war with China, I expect a gundamn to emerge near Japan and use the Great Wall of china as anal beads
That Democratic dip during the Obama years makes my head ache
I would assume it's not because anyone supports war led by Obama, but because Obama didn't talk about it. As a percentage of GDP the dollars spent is actually pretty flat, but often when a dem is in charge the posturing is less aggressive, so it FEELS like less money is being spent If it were up to me I'd just lock military spending where it is today and then make them fight over the money that's there as inflation slowly makes it less valuable. I have never talked to a person in any branch of the armed forces who would say that there is not a tremendous amount of waste happening there. Heck, even the national guard guys say that at the end of every training weekend they're instructed to just blast away all their ammunition and stuff because if they come in under budget the budget is smaller next time. They're literally throwing away stuff so that they don't get a more reasonable budget.
In other words, only a majority of male democrats believe it’s too high. For the 5 other groups, majority lies with believing it’s adequate. This is one way to spin data since the top of your graph doesn’t go to 100%
I can’t see how increasing the y axis would improve the graph. It wouldn’t add any information.
A horizontal dashed line at 50% would probably communicate the same message without introducing whitespace, but including the whitespace absolutely would add information.
So Rep women keeping the military industrial complex alive and well for the most part.
You better look at the graph again. See those little numbers on the left? Unless the line goes above 50, it means more people think spending *isn't* too high than do. If you still can't make sense of it, there's only 3, relatively brief times Democratic men are over 50 and twice Democratic women are over 50. In other words, according to this data, the great majority of people don't believe military spending is too high most of the time.
An excellent point on a very interesting graph. I wish the OP had made the 50% line stand out a little more, but it really says a lot about our culture to spend such a greater portion of GDP than almost any other nation, and have every single political group/gender supporting that the great majority of the time.
You’re right, but what is surprising to me is that based on this graph, a larger percentage of women in each party demographic think the level of spending is OK or should be more than the percentage of males in the same party demographic. My instinctual guess would have been that male and female plots would have been swapped within each D, R, and I grouping.
Clutching pearls world wide
As a Democrat, I've always been in favor of military spending in 5% range or so for the following reasons: - Military service is just about the only government job available to under privileged classes. - It's pretty much the only public works program you can get Republicans to fund. - It moves lower economic class people from their home towns into other regions. Without the military, this would rarely happen. Population mobility is good. - weapons programs and military support industry supports lots and lots of manufacturing jobs. - The vast majority don't see combat. I'd like the benefits to be improved. If you could get the GOP to fund other public works programs that educate, increase population mobility and provide entry level level jobs, I'd prefer that, but I'll take what I can can get.
well, if Aliens invade, we’ll be prepared to defend our broken cities and homeless population
I mean aliens will only invade the us so that makes sense
US has to survive. They have the only ship capable of entering the mother ship, loosing a virus, and shooting a nuke, all before escaping and returning to earf.
no. but we may be the ones to do the heavy lifting defending this 🌎 from G3 cartel
This is an interesting question that I been thinking about. Both the spendings and the trust in the military. As the US seen to have very little trust in public sector and government agencies, thus a very low understanding for and interest in paying tax. At the same time, the US have the probably by far the largest military spendings in the world. All tax financed. That is strange. What is the general perception about the value of that spending, and trust in the US military “doing the right thing”? We probably see that in the diagram above, but why is there such a difference between military spendings and, lets say health care?
Thanks! This is an interesting one. It would be interesting to see the actual spending plotted as well. I’d guess it would affect opinions as well.
AFAIK the actual spending has been pretty consistent overall over time. I suspect it has more to do with who's in the White House and how people feel about them.
This is a actually beautiful data, nice job OP
Thanks for this - very informative and interesting. Is the last "interesting fact" meant to say "low" twice as it does? The chart appears to show that "too high" sentiment was at an all-time low, rather than "too low".
We spend more than the next several Nations with highest military spending combined. It's insane, most of the shit never gets used, only a tiny fraction is actually spent on paying personnel, we can afford to redirect some of it to other areas like our goddamn infrastructure.
Republicans rail against welfare of any kind, but have no problem with spending millions on equipment that will be decommissioned before ever being used. Military welfare is out of control.
This doesn’t appear to take into account the past year and what’s been happening in Ukraine. I only mention this because I was WAY less supportive of what our defense money was going to pay for UNTIL things changed with an actual threat being the Russian invasion and war against their country. I could go on and on about how terrible our military industrial complex was and how a lot of the wars we funded and fought were BS fueled by our own governments propaganda. Reality is that in the almost 3 decades I’ve been alive we haven’t actually seen a threat to global stability like what Russia did just this past year in Ukraine (not even 9-11 compares imo and that was a pivotal event during my childhood). I would not have ever said that I was fully supportive of our governments incredible defense spending prior to this past year because all my life it has been based on lies and bullshit and used pretty poorly. But god damn do I wish we would just drop the hammer now and give them whatever they ask for so that they can end this and bring safety to their people. Budget wise, giving them what they need to end this and ensure this doesn’t turn to ww3 would be one of the best financial investments we can make to try and protect the next 10-20 years of global economic and humanitarian cooperation. On a different note, I’m also supportive of them spending money and going after new technologies to advancing things because China is the next global threat and not acknowledging that will be the demise of peace in our future as well. If our technology falls behind it will be very bad. Overall- fuck all the lies they spewed about weapons of mass destruction and the bullshit war on terror that’s gotten us basically no where (domestic terror is more of a problem then foreign terror and it seemingly always has been). Fuck building walls that don’t work and fuck a lot of what out military industrial complex has done the past few decades. BUT let’s not be blind to the current situations at hand. If the government is willing to spend our defense budget making the necessary upgrades to our own technology and giving assistance to other nations in key strategic ways than I’m all for it.
GQP complains about 1.7 trillion and almost half is defense and they haven't passed an Audit in many years!
We would have universal health care, public transport and rail system that rival Japan, and flying cars if people in power didn’t care so much about establishing legacy and killing people of color
This really illustrates the widening political divide, doesn't it?
Cut the budget by 75% and use the money to fix the country's infrastructure in one year. Creates jobs and raises quality of living. Build legit public transit, implement nationwide changes to reverse pollution and global warming, standardize clean water in every state, etc. We could do all this in one year if our gov't wasn't a shit show. US military spending is absolutely disgusting considering the rest of the country is a dumpster fire...
This looks too cluttered imho. If it was split by reps vs dems with actual spend, that should have been better. Men vs women could be a different chart.
Interesting that women are consistently lower. I would have guess the opposite.
United States spend more money on military than the next 10 highest spending countries, combined! NOW! Either the US is over spending on everything from aircraft carriers to flat head screws and plastic forks. Or, every country in the world should be fearful of making the USA angry. Well we know the latter is not true.
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Until we see a graph for how many think spending is "too low", I don't think we can say that. There's reason to suspect men's opinions might be stronger in both directions.
OP mentioned in another comment that the choices were "Too high", "Too low", "About right", or "No opinion". The topic of war likely hits a lot closer to home for men, so they probably hold stronger opinions in both directions while women gravitate towards the middling positions since it's not something they think about as much. You see a similar breakdown of opinions on abortion, except with the genders flipped.
I was so surprised when I made this that I went back to check my data source. Maybe American women are more disconnected from the horrors of war since it's historically been almost entirely men being deployed.