Posts » Percentage of GDP is NOT a unit of spending
There’s a lot of discussions happening these days in Europe about military spendings, since Russia is an aggressive neighbor who wages war against other countries, be it Georgia 13 years ago, Ukraine 11 and 3 years ago, and who know who’s next.
During these discussions one number shows up every time - how much money is spent on military matters. And that number is almost always expressed as a percentage of GDP.
But GDP is a gross domestic product. It’s NOT a unit of spending. You don’t have 100% GDP annually to allocate towards spending. You have 100% of annual budget to allocate. Period.
Let me repeat: percentage of GDP is NOT a unit of spending.
I get it that by spending money on domestic military production, military personel, etc, that money comes back to country’s budget in form of taxes, other spendings, etc, but again that’s not how we should be presenting it.
I did some checks and actual military spending in Polish budget for the current year is around 20% (186 out of 920 billion zlotys).
That’s a shitload of money but more on that next.