Or, to put it another way, the US GDP is over 6 times that of the UK or France, so a 1% difference in GDP amounts to spending almost 10 times as much money. By comparison, China, the #2 spender by $ spends a smaller percentage of their GDP than either France or the UK. Further, the countries which tend to spend the largest percentages of their GDP on military spending tend to be countries with low stability, high chances of conflict with neighboring countries, and a large reliance on outside involvement to maintain some semblance of stability.

Entitlements, by definition, are paid for by the recipients in some way, and are often capped by how much the individual paid into the system. At times when the entitlements are especially needed, these limits are sometimes waived or modified, which is one source of entitlement problems. Another source of entitlement problems comes when there is less need for those entitlements and government is attracted by the large amounts of money going into those entitlements. The US (and much of the west) happens to be in a long period when there has been great need which also happens to have followed a very long period when there was very little need. So, most of the money was stolen to pay the bills for everything else in the 90s and the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, then anything left in the markets was destroyed by the economic situations which followed, and eventually the entitlement systems will no longer be able to meet the demands placed upon them. Add the Baby Boomers to the Social Security system with a heavier reliance on it for retirement income (thanks to the near elimination of corporate retirement when they decided the massive amounts of cash on their books waiting for Baby Boomers to start collecting looked bad for their bottom line), and I'm sure the outlook is just wonderful for my chances of ever collecting the money I've put into any number of entitlements, unless I find myself in the most miserable situation of my life before the government finds a way to cut every last remnant of the safety net.

> There are many ways to characterize numbers, but in the 2015 budget the US spends over $600 billion on the military, an enormous amount. The nation spends amounts of the similar magnitude on Medicare, Social Security, etc.

As Krugman defined the US gov - it is an insurance company with an army attached. The executive branch has very little monetary freedom to execute.