You are not catching on to my main point. You are typical of posters who pick on tidnits and miss the main point. Heard of getting lost in the forest looking at trees?
The main point, in simple English, is that when a country or individual spends more than they can afford, bankruptcy is straight ahead. It matters not if it is spent on welfare, military adventures, or healthcare.
Every dollar US spends on any foreign military expenditures adds directly to the deficit. It is really not complicated. We are running Billions & Trillions of dollar deficits every year and the loan principal keeps going up. Which means more interest to be paid every year.
It is exactly same as an individual who is spending faster than his ability to pay loans.
Spending on Medicare & Medicaid & Social Security (currently spending more Billions than taking in taxes) is harder to stop than foreign military spending. Why do we have hundreds of military bases all over the world on borrowed money?
Nonsense. I am rejecting your thesis as historically indefensible. You are asserting that the same empire that somehow afforded expeditions of military conquest in foreign lands and then held them for hundreds of years, was somehow too expensive to maintain a defensive capability on its own turf. Yet it costs more to conquer a nation than to retain it after the structure of a police state is in place. Your "point" is logically indefensible.
Once the cost of disbanding its army into welfare queens was posed they had to BUY one, costing the funding to support TWO cohorts, military and welfare constituencies. Yet you blame the cost of sustaining the military alone. It's absurd. They afforded the conquest. They maintained it for hundreds of years. It was the depravity of the nation that created and amplified the demand for expended revenue, not the cost of defense which was also higher because the soldiers, many of whom were foreigners, had no loyalty to the Roman Empire. They had to be paid more to stay and would not fight with the motives of freemen.