An Inconvenient Truth: How The Obama Administration Became Earth’s Largest Arms Dealer

ZeroHedge is a crackpot source, not reliable. They mix fact, fiction & speculation into a hodgepodge that seems calculated to mislead and confuse.

For example, the article says, “Since 2001, the U.S. government has more than tripled its total defense budget to $700 billion — almost as much as every other country in the world spends combined.”

That’s a lie. Here are the numbers. They are mostly from Wikipedia, which cites GPO documents, but I calculated the CPI-adjusted numbers using this CPI calculator: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

Current dollar defense budget, 2001: $335B, 2015: $637B
Current dollar total federal budget, 2001: $1,960B, 2015: $3,640B
Defense budget in 2001 dollars (CPI-adjusted), 2001: $335B, 2015: $448B
Defense budget in 2015 dollars (CPI-adjusted), 2001: $476B, 2015: $637B
Defense percentage of federal budget, 2001: 17.1%, 2015: 16.0%

In inflation-adjusted dollars, defense spending only increased about 34% from 2001 to 2015, and as a percentage of the federal budget it stayed about the same. Even in raw dollars (not adjusted for inflation), it less than doubled.