Opinion | NATO Needs More Guns and Less Butter

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

58% : Since the 1960s, spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has come to dominate the federal budget.
54% : Germany's announcement of €100 billion in additional defense spending this year represents an increase of just over 0.25% of GDP, leaving Berlin still under the 2% commitment agreed to by North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies.
54% : Spending offsets to accommodate higher defense spending would surely require slowing the growth in social-insurance spending.
51% : Tax revenue relative to the size of the economy in France (45%), Germany (38%), Canada (34%) and the U.K. (32%) doesn't leave much room to tax more without depressing economic activity.
49% : High levels of public debt make it unlikely that countries will want to pay to increase their defense spending with new borrowing.
46% : The U.S. and its NATO allies will face a challenging set of economic trade-offs and political realities in achieving higher defense spending.
45% : A significant tax increase in the U.S. would need to be accompanied by fundamental tax reform, dialing back income taxes (as with the 2017 reduction in corporate tax rates) and increasing reliance on consumption taxes.
45% : So, too, is the antipathy of Democratic and Republican officials alike toward creating the fiscal space necessary to accommodate greater defense spending.
38% : Paying for higher levels of defense spending will force most governments either to raise taxes or cut spending.

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