> What sources have you used to arrive at the outlays of "8-10% of US
> GDP for nearly 40 years"?
I'm referring to 1945-85. The numbers: "The US Peace Dividend", Table A1, pp 55-56, Chapter 3: Macroeconomic Impacts of Disarmament and the Peace Dividend in the US Economy. Robert M. Coen and Bert G. Hickman. Crunch the numbers, and military spending averaged the following per decade:
1940s 18.4% 1950s 10.2% 1960s 8.5% 1970s 5.8%
> proportion of the imperial outlays that ever went into academic think
> tanks and area studies programs? I'd think that's obviously
> minuscule compared to military spending.
The GI bill paved the way for the mass university, and Pentagon contracts subsidized university research for decades.
> And what does "cell-phonization" have to do with the spread of
> English?
The cellphone market contradicts your thesis of an all-encompassing, almighty, impregnable US Empire. This is 2005, not 1985.
-- DRR