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You can throw up all the GDP numbers you want, but I prefer to reside in the real world.
That's why I also threw up actual dollars.
As a percent of GDP, Defense spending has remained on average around the same percentage for the past 2 decades
As dollars adjusted for inflation, Defense spending has grew over the past 2 decades by more than 50%.
As just straight dollars, Defense spending has grew over the past 2 decades by more than 100%
You can talk about residing in the "real world" but apparently the word "real" has a very different meaning in your reality, specifically meaning "imaginary based on my own hyper partisan biases".
You stated this:
Our armed forces have been cut in half over the past two decades.
Now, you specifically just specified our armed forces. Not the active duty men of our armed forces, but the armed forces as a whole. That, frankly, is incorrect. The military has grown substantially, based on some measures its doubled, in the past decade. Where you are correct on is the men in charge of the Pentagon have gotten more and more money and yet have used it less and less on actual soldiers. But even if we allowed your change of goal posts from "The armed forces" to "troops" you'd STILL be factually wrong.
In the past two decades we've reduced our actual troop size by around 40%, or just over 600 thousand soldiers. During that time, George H.W. Bush accounted for roughly 341k of those troops being cut while Clinton presided over roughly 320k being removed.
So with LESS money our military had more troops two decades ago than they do now, which seems to suggest that in the past two decades as the military's budget has stayed the same / doubled (depending how you look at it) they've chosen to spend more on things OTHER than the troops than on actual number of troops. That seems to be an issue with the Pentagon, the people running the show, and the people deciding what to do with the budget...not the budget themselves.
Haven't you and other republicans been screaming about how we shouldn't be giving more money to the government when they're using it ineffectively and wasting it? Well, if you care so much about troop size, your Pentagon has been using the ever growing and ever expanding budget ineffectively and wasting it, yet in this case your solution is to continue to give them more money to waste.
Link 1 (for 1990 number)
Link 2 (for current number)