Left’s biggest achievement is its ability to create bubbles of comforting catch phrases, in which it traps whole populations of the countries, knowing fully well that in general people are busy, and few have inclinations to go beyond headlines of media story, or do independent study.
All Indians grow up hearing Left’s explanation of why we are poor and the US is rich. Instead of giving straight and truthful answer that that is because we are socialists, and the US is Capitalist, their pet answer is,”They have become rich selling us the weapons, and we have become poor, buying those weapons. Instead of spending on health and education, we spend on military, so we are poor. It will all change when you vote a PM from CPM.”
Ok, let us look at the figures. (all are from wikipedia, and verified independently also. All are in billions of dollars)(second figure is %age of GDP spent on military by each country.)
And this is total spend on military, not just on imports of weapons, by the way. But let us assume it is all on imports of weapons, and from the US only.
Horror, we are spending all our earnings on US weapons…!!!
No…..wait……
US spending on military is 600. Next are China and Russia. Evidently they don’y buy anything from the US. That takes away 300. Europeans also do not buy from the US, they make their own. 200 more gone.
If all remaining countries buy all weapons from the US, and spend all their money earmarked for military on imports only, total comes to 270 billion dollars, including 50 billion dollar of Indian military spend. That is 1.7% of annual US GDP of 16 trillion dollars. You read that right. Just 1.7%.
Even total military spend of the whole world is only 1.77 trillion dollar. That is if the whole world including the US spends its whole budget on buying weapons from the US only, it would still be only 10% of the US GDP.
So US doesn’t need to sell any weapons to anybody to be the richest and the most powerful country in the world. It is rich because it is Capitalist. Though it is being hobbled by its own Leftists (one of them is now its President) but it still has awesome human Capital and still more than 50% of its population opposes all freebies. It is going to be around a long long time.
That is the power of free market.
— World total 1,776.0 2.3
1 United States United States 610.0 3.5
2 China China[a] 216.0 2.1
3 Russia Russia[a] 84.5 4.5
4 Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia[b] 80.8 10.4
5 France France 62.3 2.2
6 United Kingdom United Kingdom 60.5 2.2
7 India India 50.0 2.4
8 Germany Germany[a] 46.5 1.2
9 Japan Japan 45.8 1.0
10 South Korea South Korea 36.7 2.6
11 Brazil Brazil 31.7 1.4
12 Italy Italy 30.9 1.5
13 Australia Australia 25.4 1.8
14 United Arab Emirates 22.8 5.1
15 Turkey Turkey 22.6 2.2
