Photo by Joel Rivera-Camacho
I’m going back to harping on one of my favorite topics, because it is really necessary right now. The $1.5 trillion that Donald Trump is asking for the military for next year is a crazy amount of money. It should be laughed out of Congress, but due to Trump-cult member Republicans, and a professionally inept Democratic Party leadership, he might get something like this passed.
The first thing that we should be clear about is the size of the increase. The budget enacted for the military for fiscal year 2025 was $862 billion, a bit less than 2.9% of GDP. That’s roughly where spending had been since the winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a decade ago. Trump’s budget would raise military spending to just under 5% of GDP, a level that we haven’t seen since the end of the Cold War.
This should have everyone screaming about why we suddenly need so much money for defense. After all, Trump is supposed to be buddies with Putin. And Russia’s GDP is less than one-quarter as large as ours in any case. Do we need to spend an amount equal to 20% of its GDP to defend ourselves from it?
China does have a much larger GDP than the U.S., but we had been largely friendly rivals. Perhaps Trump has changed that, but China had, until recently, been one of our largest trading partners. Our trade with China has fallen sharply, but if we are now enemies, we will end up spending tens of trillions in an arms race with an economy that is already more than a third larger than the U.S. economy and growing much more rapidly. We might look to go back to trading with China; it would be much cheaper.
Trump has also made other enemies in his 15 months in office, including most of our former allies. Perhaps he needs the money to defend us against France, Canada, and Denmark.
If Congress wants to at least pretend to earn its paycheck, it should demand some clear answers as to why Donald Trump thinks he has to spend 60% more defending the country than Obama, Biden, or he himself did in his first term.
The other point is that people should be pounding on reporters who don’t make clear how much money Trump is asking for his military buildup. NO ONE knows how much $600 billion is, and ALL the reporters who will just write down the number KNOW that no one can attach any meaning to it.
If reporters want to pretend to earn their paychecks, put the number in some damn context. It’s around 8% of the total budget; it comes to more than $4,500 per household.
It is 20 times as much as the annual cost of extending the enhanced Obamacare subsidies for 22 million people. It is more than a thousand times the appropriation for public broadcasting that Trump and the Republicans nixed last year.
And it is 2,400 times the size of the fraud in Minnesota that got Trump and his followers in a frenzy. The amount of fraud that has been identified in Minnesota is $250 million. The fraud involved some Black Somalis, so this is just Trump’s way of yelling, “Black immigrants, FRAUD!” (The scheme was organized by a white person, and the scam was uncovered and prosecuted under Biden.) We would like fraud to be zero, but in a government that spends over $7.5 trillion a year, some fraud is inevitable, just as is the case with large private corporations.
And to take one other measure that should get more attention, it is almost 60 times the $10 billion that Donald Trump is planning to steal from taxpayers with an absurd lawsuit against the I.R.S. The lawsuit claims Trump was harmed because a contractor leaked Trump’s tax returns, showing he paid very little in taxes in 2019 and 2020.
Ken Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire who also had his information leaked, had his lawsuit on this leak thrown out in 2024 because he couldn’t show any damages. But Griffin wasn’t a sitting president who could order the Treasury Department to turn over whatever money he asked for.
Reporters can pick other comparisons, but they can’t pretend they are doing serious reporting if they just write down Trump’s budget request without any context. Reporting is about conveying information. Writing down a huge number that is meaningless to everyone who sees it is a fraternity ritual, it’s not reporting.
Trump’s military budget request is tens or hundreds of times larger than the items that ordinarily are cause for major political debates in Washington. That is not a political statement, that’s a fact. People need to know it.
This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.
