They really are a very, very small percentage of the tax money that gets spent, if you ignore healthcare (which is a huge, nebulous topic that warrants its own discussion irrespective of this discussion).

But I'm not willing to ignore health care in a discussion of poverty in the US. Social Security is also a safety net program with an enormous impact.

But yes, defense is the big one. The FY2008 request is calling for $440B for DoD, $36B for Veterans' Affairs, $31B for DHS, and a number of agencies (intel, etc.) spend part of their budget on national defense. Total budget request is $871B in discretionary spending, so the above is nearly 60% of that.

Education? $54B. NSF? $6B. HUD? $33B. DOT? $13B. State, including diplomacy? $34B.

A reasonable reduction in defense spending would be enough to make huge changes in those fields. Honestly, from the moment the Berlin Wall came down, we should have been thinking of only two facets:

1) Prepare for asymmetric warfare. Reduce the purchase of fighter planes, submarines, and other expensive items which are only useful against conventional militaries. No conventional military in the world wants to fight us. We outspend the next 10 combined. Prepare for the kinds of fighting we saw in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan-- large numbers of low-tech guerillas operating in decentralized units. Lots of those people want to fight us. Focus on rapid force projection, intelligence, and counterinsurgency work. Minimize how much we actually fight by only intervening when necessary, and involving other powers wherever practical. Diplomacy is cheaper than fighting anyway-- enough of this cowboy ####, and knock off the "Axis of Evil"-type rhetoric. Even if you do want to swat someone, running your mouth only makes you look unnecessarily aggressive and threatening, and if you don't swat them you've just made extra enemies for free.

2) Maintain enough of the nuclear deterrent. We don't need quite so many missiles as we have, but there is a political utility to having the ability to obliterate any state actor who posed a real threat to America, even if we don't intend to use it.

I'd bet you could do both of the above, cut the defense budget 25% in the short term, 50% in the long term, and still maintain global military dominance.

I suspect some reduction will happen during the next administration, which is why I made it a point in my recent job negotiations to switch some of my portfolio towards supervising energy-related projects (solar/PV, most likely) instead of purely defense-related stuff.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com