$11,200 per Year for the Military or $220 per household for ACA?
Which one would you want to pay? Dean Baker does the comparison of Military expenditures and as compared to ACA subsides. Details in the Dean commentary.
Is paying $11,200 a year to soothe the president’s paranoia in his demented state reasonable? Donald Trump says you should. The Republicans in Congress are likely to agree. So, prepare to empty your wallet. Krugman runs the numbers for us.
In contrast to many of the budget items that consume huge space in the media, Trump’s proposed $1.5 trillion military budget is real money. It’s also important to point out that the proper reference point is the $862 billion that we were projected to spend in fiscal 2025, the last Biden budget, not the 2026 Trump spending. Even adjusting for inflation, the spending in 2027 would only be around $915 billion next year, almost $600 billion less than Trump’s request.
By comparison, extending the enhanced Obamacare subsidies for one year would have cost $30 billion or $220 per household. Continuing the expanded child tax credit that President Biden put in place in 2021 would have cost roughly $100 billion a year or $750 a household.
PREFAR, the program to combat AIDS in Africa that Elon Musk delighted in slashing, was projected to cost $4.85 billion last year. That comes to $36 a household. The annual appropriation for public broadcasting was $535 million, which came to $4 a household.
It’s a fair bet that the vast majority of the public has no idea of the relative size of these programs. This is because major media outlets, like the New York Times, Washington Post, and National Public Radio, have made a conscious decision to do uninformative budget reporting.
It would take ten seconds and ten words to provide some context that would make the millions, billions, and trillions meaningful to their audiences. But these news outlets have chosen not to take the time and space, presumably because they don’t want to inform the public about where their budget dollars are going.
Anyhow, while the media may not choose to highlight it, I will do what I can to call attention to the ridiculous amount of money that Trump wants to spend on the military. Trump says he needs this spending because, apparently, he now imagines threats that were previously missed, not only by President Biden and both parties in Congress before his election, but even by Trump himself in his first term.
When he was president the first time around, he never made any request for military spending that was remotely in the ballpark of the $1.5 trillion he is requesting now. Has some new threat materialized in the last five years that wasn’t there in 2021, or is Trump just more insightful in 2026 than he was in his first term?
On the latter point, we have to remember that we have a president who imagined that Haitians were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, who seems to think that refugees seeking asylum came out of insane asylums in foreign countries, and is blowing up fishing boats because he says they are “narco-terrorists.” Is this the person everyone wants to hand over $11,200 to?
There really needs to be a serious debate on an increase in military spending of this magnitude. It is massive, and it would be used as an excuse not to address real needs for many years into the future. The pressure will have to come from the public. Politicians do whatever they are pushed to do; they are not leaders.
And the media just write down numbers. They say informing the public is not their business. So, get informed. Trump’s military budget is very big bucks, and it matters, even apart from the wars.