On Wednesday, United States President Donald Trump declared in a post at Truth Social that he has determined the military budget for the next fiscal year should be hiked to 1.5 trillion dollars.
A Thursday Reuters article by Costas Pitas and Andrea Shalal quantifies Trumps proposed spending increase as amounting to a 66 percent increase over what the US Congress approved for 2026. The Reuters article further relates that this proposed increase in spending is, historically speaking, very large. The article states:
Byron Callan, a defense analyst with Capital Alpha Partners, said Trump’s post raised questions about where the funds would be directed and whether they could even be absorbed by the defense sector.
He said the last time the U.S. Defense Department saw an increase higher than 50% was in 1951 during the Korean War, with even huge surges in military spending under former President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and 1982 amounting to 25% and 20%.
An analysis of the cost of this spending should go beyond dollars alone and consider as well what economists term the opportunity costs — what is foregone because of Trump’s proposed military buildup. President Dwight D. Eisenhower provided such an analysis in his April 16, 1953 “The Chance for Peace” speech. Summing up his tabulation of opportunity costs of military spending, Eisenhower in the speech related spending on the military to “humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” Eisenhower warned:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Each Congress member would do well to read or listen to Eisenhower’s speech and give it thoughtful consideration before voting on Trump’s proposed military spending increase.
Reprinted with permission from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.