In an oversimplified article, Jeremy Lott at the Washington Examiner claims that "[i]f GOP won't cut defense, we'll never cut spending." There is indeed a government spending problem in the United States, as the following graph shows, but the problem isn't with the contribution from national defense: Since the demobilization after World War I, general government expenditures in the U.S. have risen rapidly, increasing by more than an order of magnitude as their share of the economy.  In recent years, spending has been so high as to rival the World War II peak, when the nation was fully mobilized for total war on a global scale. But here is the share of general government spending devoted to defense since 1949: While general government spending has exploded during the past 70 years, the share of government spending assigned to the military has dropped from nearly 80% in the early 1950s to just 8.7% in 2015. If you think military...(Read Full Post)