It's easy to poke at the military budget as wasteful, but human history has shown that military expenditure is at a minimum, necessary. The same cannot be said of most preferred spending avenues for the cause of the day.
I'm reading that the US spends about $893 billion[1] on national defence and about $5.3 trillion on health care in 2024, with spending on track for roughly $5.6 trillion in 2025 [2][3]. These figures don't match my intuition...
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[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/PDF/IN1242...
[2] https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2025.0...
[3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/how-muc...