[bobbydavid]

Have you seen that d3 visualization of the US federal budget? It's pretty interesting. Social security, Defense, and Medicare make up the lion's share of spending. you probably don't use these (except defense, arguably indirectly, but I suspect your politics would disagree with the budget size)

[mcv]

He's probably using social security and medicare more than defense. The chance that he gets sick or unemployed is probably a lot larger than the chance that the US gets attacked or significantly threatened.

Knowing that you're covered in case anything goes wrong is enough to make the taxes worth it.

[rayiner]

That's kind of a misleading comparison. The chances of the US getting attacked or threatened are low because we have tremendous war capability. For examples of the opposite, see Tibet, Palestine, etc, or all the countries that were colonized by the Europeans, or the countries whose natural resources are being extracted on questionably favorable terms by companies like Shell.

Every American benefits from the fact that we can dictate terms in nearly any interaction with other countries. It's a huge aspect of our political dynamic that most Americans take for granted, because they have no experience with a country where the democratic will has to be tempered by considerations of how military superiors will respond.

[mjn]

It's true that the U.S. and Tibet are on opposite sides of that spectrum, but there are a number of countries whose military spending as a percentage of GDP is between 1/4 and 1/2 as high as it is in the US, but who nonetheless defend themselves credibly. Examples: France, Turkey, Italy, Australia, Canada.

I can buy that some proportion of military spending is therefore for protection, but the actual amount of military spending seems considerably higher than the amount needed to keep the U.S. from being colonized.