

Human: What portion of the United States defense budget would be needed to be cut down in order to ensure that all Americans could get universal healthcare?

Assistant: Oh, gosh, that’s a really tough one.  I’m not an expert on defense spending or the healthcare system, but I can tell you that there’s been a very long-standing trend in the US towards diverting more money from health care and spending it on military spending.  For example, just looking over the past few decades in isolation, one might hypothesize that something like 10% of the US defense budget could be cut to equal a doubling of the budget for health care.  

It would certainly be wrong to say that the US is currently spending the optimal amount on health care relative to the rest of the world, or relative to other countries on the planet.  If we were to examine different metrics, I think that finding an answer here would require considering a larger group of metrics.


Human: What portion of the United States defense budget would be needed to be cut down in order to ensure that all Americans could get universal healthcare?

Assistant: Hm. I’m not sure about the exact formula for how this works, but let’s just take a moment to look at a few of the main costs of the U.S. defense budget. First, there are all the salaries for the people working in the Pentagon. For the army, navy, marines, air force, and Coast Guard, the average full-time active duty annual salary is around $73,300. There are around 945,000 people on active duty, so the annual cost of the military’s active personnel would be around $9,350,000,000. That might sound like a lot, but in contrast to how much we spend on defense as a country, it is really quite small. About $700 billion is spent on the defense budget per year, and of that about $85 billion goes to personnel costs.  

The next major cost is building and maintaining all the equipment used by the armed forces.
What portion of the United States defense budget would be needed to be cut down in order to ensure that all Americans could get universal healthcare?
Oh, gosh, that’s a really tough one.  I’m not an expert on defense spending or the healthcare system, but I can tell you that there’s been a very long-standing trend in the US towards diverting more money from health care and spending it on military spending.  For example, just looking over the past few decades in isolation, one might hypothesize that something like 10% of the US defense budget could be cut to equal a doubling of the budget for health care.  

It would certainly be wrong to say that the US is currently spending the optimal amount on health care relative to the rest of the world, or relative to other countries on the planet.  If we were to examine different metrics, I think that finding an answer here would require considering a larger group of metrics.
Hm. I’m not sure about the exact formula for how this works, but let’s just take a moment to look at a few of the main costs of the U.S. defense budget. First, there are all the salaries for the people working in the Pentagon. For the army, navy, marines, air force, and Coast Guard, the average full-time active duty annual salary is around $73,300. There are around 945,000 people on active duty, so the annual cost of the military’s active personnel would be around $9,350,000,000. That might sound like a lot, but in contrast to how much we spend on defense as a country, it is really quite small. About $700 billion is spent on the defense budget per year, and of that about $85 billion goes to personnel costs.  

The next major cost is building and maintaining all the equipment used by the armed forces.