Closer, sure. And even then you notice they have to bundle all the countries in the EU together to get a comparison. But it's no secret our economy is less than thriving. We have a lot of economic problems at once -- the slumping housing market, the slumping stock market, the ballooning debt, the dollar falling off a cliff. So many things going badly at once makes it hard to fix. Paul O'Neill, Bush's first secretary of the treasury (ousted for not toeing the party line), put it memorably in a recent interview. He said it's like giving someone 10 glasses of water and telling them one of the glasses has poison in it. The person probably isn't going to drink any of them.

>Not the military specifically. But the purpose of it was to show that one argument has been that we are so rich, we can afford the military without it affecting anything else. But other nations are getting closer to us in terms of GDP.
>
>>I don't see anything at all about the military in that excerpt.
>>
>>>And you wingnuts who brag that the US is great cause we got such a massive military get a special mention in this piece:
>>>
>>>
>>>Such expenditures are not only morally obscene, they are fiscally unsustainable. Many neo-conservatives and poorly informed patriotic Americans believe that, even though our defense budget is huge, we can afford it because we are the richest country on Earth. That statement is no longer true. The world's richest political entity, according to the CIA's World Factbook, is the European Union. The E.U.'s 2006 GDP was estimated to be slightly larger than that of the U.S. Moreover, China's 2006 GDP was only slightly smaller than that of the U.S., and Japan was the world's fourth richest nation.
>>>
>>>A more telling comparison that reveals just how much worse we're doing can be found among the current accounts of various nations. The current account measures the net trade surplus or deficit of a country plus cross-border payments of interest, royalties, dividends, capital gains, foreign aid, and other income. In order for Japan to manufacture anything, it must import all required raw materials. Even after this incredible expense is met, it still has an $88bn per year trade surplus with the U.S. and enjoys the world's second highest current account balance (China is number one). The U.S. is number 163 -- last on the list, worse than countries such as Australia and the U.K. that also have large trade deficits. Its 2006 current account deficit was $811.5bn; second worst was Spain at $106.4bn. This is unsustainable.
>>>
>>>
>>>http://www.alternet.org/story/83555/?page=1