#1 Prior to the beginning of the “War on Terror” our national debt was under 6 trillion dollars. Today, it has more than doubled and currently sits at a whopping 14.3 trillion dollars.
#2 Today, the U.S. military is in nearly 130 different nations and it has a total of about 700 military bases around the globe. It costs approximately 100 billion dollars each year to maintain these military bases.
#3 U.S. military spending is greater than the military spending of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined.
#4 The United States already accounts for 46.5% of all military spending on the planet. China is next with only 6.6%.
#5 If Bill Gates gave every penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.
#6 When you throw in all “off budget” items and other categories of “defense spending” not covered in the Pentagon budget you get a grand total of somewhere between $1.01 and $1.35 trillion spent on national defense in 2010.
#7 The U.S. government borrows an average of about 168 million more dollars every single hour.
#8 The Pentagon currently gobbles up 56 percent of all discretionary spending by the federal government.
#9 Between 2007 and 2010, U.S. GDP grew by only 4.26%, but the U.S. national debt soared by 61% during that same time period.
#10 The cost for the first week of airstrikes on Libya was 600 million dollars. Keep in mind that the leader of the opposition in Libya has admitted that his forces contain large numbers of the same “al-Qaeda fighters” that were shooting at American troops in Iraq. So we are going broke and we are helping al-Qaeda take power in Libya at the same time.
#11 The total price tag for each F-22 fighter jet is approximately $350 million.
#12 Over the past decade, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost U.S. taxpayers well over a trillion dollars.
#13 If you went out today and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you over 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.
#14 Since 2001, the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan breaks down to well over $3,600 for every man, woman and child in the United States.
#15 Just one day of the war in Afghanistan costs more money than it took to build the entire Pentagon.
#16 The United States government is now responsible for more than a third of all the government debt in the entire world.
