Every penny - maybe more, maybe a little less. This was a pretty amazing
revelation to me. Now, the amount of defense spending is fairly always misrepresented. Many
sources try to portray defense spending as around 18% of all federal revenues - putting defense spending behind Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid. The Obama
White House puts defense spending as 24.79% of tax revenues. Or, for example,
Bill Moyers puts the number at 27% of each tax dollar.
The numbers vary because many times defense related spending is not included in a given tally of "defense spending." For example, one analysis may exclude the cost of nuclear weapons (which is lodged under the Department of Energy). Or, for example, the Obama White House's 24.79% figure includes nuclear weapon costs, but fails to include the cost of veteran benefits and disability or (most glaring and most repeated) fails to apportion any part of the national debt service payments to defense spending. (Failing to allocate a substantial portion of the debt service to defense spending is indefensible. Defense spending is one of the largest annual outlays, and at least one other large budget item - Social Security - has not added a nickel to the national debt at all. Thus, each year a significant portion of the interest on the debt is directly attributable to prior defense spending. To leave "interest payments" as some sort of free-standing, unallocable budget item ignores both reality and basic accounting principles.)
When all the properly associated defense spending is added up, you start to get a more representative number. Instead of 25 cents of every tax dollar, somewhere around 46 cents of each tax dollar goes to defense spending. The 46 cent number is pretty shocking and undiscussed. Yet . . . it still doesn't really convey the enormity of our defense spending.
Why? Look at the above chart (based on White House numbers). Without including any of the debt interest or other defense related items buried in other categories (CIA, anyone?), the White House's official number is $895 billion a year on defense spending. When debt interest and other items are added in, the real amount of annual defense spending is roughly $1 trillion. (An Atlantic article put the 2013 defense spending as $994.3 billion. The Center for Defense Information puts 2015 defense spending at $1 trillion.)
Now look on the revenue side of the above chart: all individual income tax receipts total . . . $1.1 trillion! In other words, all or nearly all of your April 15 income tax payments go only to defense spending, without paying for any other function of government.
And viewing this solely through your personal income taxes is the appropriate way to finally understand how skewed our defense spending has become. When you ask: "how much of my tax dollars go to the military?", you are not thinking about excise taxes, customs and duties, estate taxes or corporate taxes. You want to know how much of your income tax dollars go to defense spending? Fairly, you can assume 100 cents of every dollar. All of it.
Think about that the next time you hear a budget debate, worries about the deficit, or an argument about allegedly out-of-control social spending.
It is shocking . . . here is a link to Eisenhower's farewell warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex.