Le budget gargantuesque du Pentagone est, en fait, hyper-gargantuesque

Le budget du département de la défense US (celui de l’année FY2008 comme ceux qui ont précédé) continue à susciter le zèle et l’empressement des commentateurs. Au départ, on a mesuré combien ce budget gargantuesque l’était réellement ; pourtant, ce n’est encore rien… Se retournant sur le budget de l’année dernière (FY2006), Robert Higgs, de l’Independent Institute, nous démontre que ce budget du Pentagone présenté à $499 milliards dévore en réalité près du $trillion ($1.000 milliards).

Présentant et justifiant sa méthodologie, notamment derrière les habituelles allocations à d’autres ministères et agences de sommes pour des services de la défense, Higgs fait ses comptes :

«To estimate the size of the entire de facto defense budget, I gathered data for fiscal 2006, the most recently completed fiscal year, for which data on actual outlays are now available. In that year, the Department of Defense itself spent $499.4 billion. Defense-related parts of the Department of Energy budget added $16.6 billion. The Department of Homeland Security spent $69.1 billion. The Department of State and international assistance programs laid out $25.3 billion for activities arguably related to defense purposes either directly or indirectly. The Department of Veterans Affairs had outlays of $69.8 billion. The Department of the Treasury, which funds the lion’s share of military retirement costs through its support of the little-known Military Retirement Fund, added $38.5 billion. A large part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s outlays ought to be regarded as defense-related, if only indirectly so. When all of these other parts of the budget are added to the budget for the Pentagon itself, they increase the fiscal 2006 total by nearly half again, to $728.2 billion.

»To find out how much of the government’s net interest payments on publicly held national debt ought to be attributed to past debt-funded defense spending requires a considerable amount of calculation. I added up all past deficits (minus surpluses) since 1916 (when the debt was nearly zero), prorated according to each year’s ratio of narrowly defined national security spending—military, veterans, and international affairs—to total federal spending, expressing everything in dollars of constant purchasing power. This sum is equal to 91.2 percent of the value of the national debt held by the public at the end of 2006. Therefore, I attribute that same percentage of the government’s net interest outlays in that year to past debt-financed defense spending. The total amount so attributed comes to $206.7 billion.

»Adding this interest component to the previous all-agency total, the grand total comes to $934.9 billion, which is more than 87 percent greater than the Pentagon’s outlays alone.»

Tout cela nous laisse rêveurs en ce qui concerne le gargantuesque budget FY2008, qui deviendra, lorsqu’il sera mis à nu, hyper-gargantuesque.

Mis en ligne le 16 mars 2007 à 13H33