Military spendings again

muscovy's genocidal war against Ukraine causes surge in spendings. The media often compares countries' spendings in absolute numbers. This is misleading. Two of my previous posts show how to compare.

Spoiler: The Stockholm International Peacee Research Institute (SIPRI) today released its update on military expenditures. Swedish Television reported about this in its morning broadcast and I guess it will be all over the media today and tomorrow. And they will probably, as usual, refer to absolute numbers again thereby emphasising how high US spendings are compared to other countries. But absolute numbers are meaningless, military expenditures should be related to other government expenditures to show the ambitions and priorities of governments.

Reporting absolute numbers is wrong as I showed in several posts on this blog. USA needs to spend a lot to honour its commitments to Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and other countries which may be targeted by the imperialists in Beijing, muscovy, and Pyongyang.

There are other ways to compare military expenditures across countries. Comparing US to muscovy military expenditures is often done by to incorrect conversion of roubles to dollars without taking the lower muscovy prices in to account. It is, however, not necessary to convert military expenditures to dollars to compare muscovy’s military expenditures to other countries’. Relating countries’ expenditures to other government expenditures in current prices and local currencies give a correct picture of governments’ priorities. Applying that method shows that the fascist regime in the kremlin prioritises its military before its people.

Here’s a correct comparison of muscovy’s military expenditures.

How to compare Russia’s military expenditures

In a another post, I related governments’ military expenditures to their health expenditures. I combined that data with data from the Varities of Democracy project allowing me to classify countries into being autocracies or democracies.

I found that autocracies spend more money on their military while democracies spend more money on healthcare for their citizens. Looking at military alliances, I therefore found that countries belonging to ANZUS, and NATO prioritised their citizens’ health before their military while the opposite is true for countries belonging to CSTO.

But have a look yourself.

Lukashenka and Putin spend more on their military than on healthcare.

Or if you don’t want to click, here’s the key graph in that post.