Oh my. Can someone check my numbers?

    France revenue:   953,000 million EUR
    Military budget:   41,300 million EUR (approx)
    = 4.33% of tax revenue military spending

vs

    USA revenue:     4,260,000 million USD
    Military budget:   597,500 million USD
    = 14.03% of tax revenue military spending

Damn.

I used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_... (2015 numbers)

https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd...

https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-france.pdf

I believe your numbers are accurate but I also don't think that they tell the whole story. Is France's subsidy of Airbus military spending? Because America's subsidy of Boeing is. Is French scientific research spending military? Because America spends its research dollars via DARPA. And so on...

If I understand your process, you multiplied US GDP by average tax burden, which makes sense, but here's another source that added other sources up: http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/total_revenue_2015USrn and got ~6,500 billon USD for USA Revenue. Using the same military budget, that makes = 7.69% of tax on military budget.

I think I see why everyone uses GDP: tax revenue is difficult to calculate, especially when it involves 50 states and a few territories.

Largely inconsequential.

The article is not very clear. The money that is not accounted for is $62.4B. The reason that money is unaccounted for is because of trillions of dollars of accounting adjustments in budgets.

That trillion dollars figure is just summing up the magnitude of all accounting adjustments throughout all the records of the DoD. The moral equivalent of:

    SELECT SUM(ABS(trans_amount)) FROM transactions WHERE trans_type = 'Adjustments';

In an imaginary accounting DB. The $62.4B figure was the same thing minus the "ABS()"...

> It just seems a shame that a country that somehow can't afford to pay for the health care of it's citizens manages to lose track of literally trillions of dollars.

Its not trillions of dollars. Its trillions of dollars of adjustments, when you count the absolute value of all the adjustments to individual accounts. But that's -- as stated in the article -- in part because not only does every error involve at least two accounts, but also because the accounts are nested, so most adjustments in a detail account also involve adjustments in several parent accounts.

US revenue (Primarily taxes) for FY2014 was $3.02 Trillion, while defense spending was ~$640 Billion, so you could guesstimate roughly 20% of tax dollars for defense. That ~$640 Billion is out of a ~$1.1 Trillion discretionary spending by the US, while non discretionary (mandatory, things like social security and medicare) spending is over $2.4 Trillion.

If you add it all up, military spending makes up about 16% of total government spending.

Well, it didn't lose track of trillions of dollars, it lost track of tens of billions. Which is still awful, don't get me wrong, but the Army doesn't have trillions of dollars to lose.

We pay alright, social security & healthcare are nearly 50% of the federal budget.

The US spends a huge amount on healthcare too.

Poor returns, but a huge amount spent.