Are Taxpayers Getting Their Money's Worth From the Military?

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Alamy Is the federal government spending too many of your tax dollars on defense? A lot of people think so. Others worry that tax dollars aren't being spent on the right kind of defense. That's the upshot of two recent polls by Gallup. The first, conducted of 1,023 adults in February, shows that when asked about U.S. spending on national defense and foreign military conflicts, more Americans think the answer is "too much" (37 percent) rather than "too little" (28 percent). That's the bad news. The good news is that the correct answer to Gallup's poll appears to be "just right" -- that we're spending just about the right amount of money on national defense. How do we know this? A quick glance at the chart shows that the gap today between Americans saying "too much" or "too little" is about as narrow as it's ever been and far narrower than we saw... in the waning days of the Vietnam War (when there was about a 40-percentage point disparity between respondents saying "too much" and "too little"). in the start of the Reagan administration, when 51 percent of Americans said we weren't spending enough on defense -- 36 percentage points more than said "too little." or in the start of the economic crisis in 2008, when fewer than half the people polled said we should sacrifice defense spending to help balance the budget. And Speaking of Balance The other bad news is that, according to a separate Gallup poll of 1,028 adults, the money we spend on the military may not buy the kind of military most Americans want. Last month, Gallup asked which of the military's five branches was "most important to our national defense." More respondents (26 percent) named the Army. The Air Force came a close second at 23 percent, followed by the Marines (19 percent), the Navy (17 percent) and the Coast Guard (3 percent).