Where does the money get spent? I mean, really get spent? I sat down to look into it, and about twenty minutes later, got back up again. It's what we engineers call a "non-trivial problem."

Where does the military money really go? When a tank gets built, where is it built, and by who? Military supplies go overseas, but who manufactures them? How much of what our military uses is imported from, say, China?

Where does entitlement money really go? Is every product you buy with your pension made in the U.S.? How about the medical industry?

What is "wasted money," and what isn't? That question would be a project all by itself, and there would be a lot of subjective discussion of the virtue of what we use our military for, or what someone spends their pension money on. When Social Security and Defense are roughly equivalent in budget size, enough pensioners buying lotto tickets can add up.

Every time I thought about one of these questions, it raised about three more. Some things, like medical facilities caring for wounded veterans, seem to fall under the "broken window" fallacy, and I'd bet other things do too.

What really "builds" an economy? What truly creates more money out the other side than you put in? I have already submitted that taxpayer spending to "create" jobs doesn't work. In some ways, if you look at it, a lot of military spending isn't that much different than building high-speed rail in the California outback. So is NASA to some extent. God knows there are a lot of "rice bowls" being protected out there. Just looking at my own industry I can see aerospace companies and their political representatives rallying to protect a launch system that I know is not needed, except to protect these industries and their jobs. I'm not as familiar with Defense, but I know there's loads of development projects that fall into this category. Look what happens when somebody tries to cut a Defense program, even one the DOD says it doesn't even need?

I get yelled at for wanting government spending cut when it will cut jobs. How many employees work for the military, and industries it pays to do things for it? These are "jobs" by liberal calculation, where it doesn't matter if the job creates wealth or just burns it. In my book, where a job ought to generate more wealth than it consumes, I'm not so sure. And pension funds, by definition, create no new net wealth at all for the economy unless you still believe in Keynes.

I don't have a quantitative answer to any of these questions. God knows if anybody does. I'm not expecting any responses to any of the things I've brought up here. Cripes, we'd all be bogged down for weeks on it.

But the issue isn't as easy to "weight" as you think, and I ain't doing the work for free. Did I say "can of worms?" More like a barrel.