Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

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Oh my. Can someone check my numbers?

    France revenue:   953,000 million EUR
    Military budget:   41,300 million EUR (approx)
    = 4.33% of tax revenue military spending

vs

    USA revenue:     4,260,000 million USD
    Military budget:   597,500 million USD
    = 14.03% of tax revenue military spending

Damn.

I used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... (2015 numbers)

https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd...

https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-france.pdf

I believe your numbers are accurate but I also don't think that they tell the whole story. Is France's subsidy of Airbus military spending? Because America's subsidy of Boeing is. Is French scientific research spending military? Because America spends its research dollars via DARPA. And so on...

If I understand your process, you multiplied US GDP by average tax burden, which makes sense, but here's another source that added other sources up: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/total_revenue_2015USrn and got ~6,500 billon USD for USA Revenue. Using the same military budget, that makes = 7.69% of tax on military budget.

I think I see why everyone uses GDP: tax revenue is difficult to calculate, especially when it involves 50 states and a few territories.

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