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5% of GDP is often 40-50% of the countries federal budgets.
This is completely insane and it only serves to bankroll the US MIC into a new era of record profits.
It is unsustainable and will destroy economic growth as crucial infrastructure investments will fall short and it will create even more political instability and Fascism as it will be financed through cutting social security and investments and rising taxes on the lower and middle class.
As this is economically unsustainable there is only one solution while keeping this spending up. Recover some of the money spent by actually using the weapons to seize resources of foreign countries by war.
Last but not least a lot of the systems bought from the US could come with a kill switch so it will effectively being EU paying for renting US weapons that only work according to US interests.
Spain is the only country with some sense in this.
Spain's budget is ~21% of its gdp (with >10% unemployment you can imagine how bad they fucking bleed us with taxes, the poor I mean, for the rich is the same as anywhere else), but more than half of it goes to pensions, and we have a huge ,dense, and expensive bureaucracy that takes a good chunk of the rest (I don't have numbers sorry).
So, I think you are right, there's just no more money: touching the pensions is political suicide (and very unfair), scaling down bureaucracy is just impossible, rising taxes would suffocate us (even more), taxing the rich is as much of a fairy tale as it is in any other country...
On top of that, if you read a history book you will see that the Spanish military is a much bigger threat for Spain than the Russian. I don't think it's in the best interest of the Spanish people to give them more money.
I'm afraid I must disagree on some points.
While official numbers give an unemployment of 10.9, we must remember that there is a large underground economy, so actual numbers may be in the 5-6% range, or less.
I agree on the bureaucracy, but I think its downscalable.
Taxes I agree. They are proportionately larger than in most of the EU, and services worse.
On the military, a hard disagree. I know several people in the military, and as in may countries, you have hawks, but most of the army is professional, and very, very neutral politically. The image of a politically active military is an old image, from the dictatorship, 50 years ago. Even then, when a coup was attempted, the majority of the armed forces shut it down. That image of the armed forces is mainly a discourse used by separatist regions for propaganda (not saying that propaganda isn't used in non separatist regions, just different), and the hard left.
Remember that unemployment rate here counts only people inscribed in the unemployment services. I don't think half of them are working illegally, at best that would be a rounding error.
Downsizing the bureaucracy would take many years, since public servants 'cannot be fired' (bit of an oversimplification, but the reality in practice), and would take some strong political will, which we lack in Spain.
And about the armed forces, I know some ex-military that are kinda left-leaning, but the average is absolutely right leaning (from straight up nazis, to 'apoliticals' that if you talk with them for a short while will let go some racist, homophobic, or generally reactionary comments very casually). And that's the rank and file, if you go to the higher ups you'll find, well, as many fascist as you can expect from a military that wasn't purged or rehabilitated after a fascist regime.
Do you mean the coup that the king himself organized so he could stop it afterwards to come out as the hero that saved the day while also putting some fear in the population?? That coup d'Γ©tat 'attempt'??
They are actually below average
https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/05/16/personal-average-tax-rates-in-europe-which-countries-saw-the-biggest-rise-in-2024
Services, I guess that's more a matter of opinion, but having lived in Germany, UK and the US, I think they're OK
I don't think that's right. This other link (from another commenter in this thread), also euronews, says 47%. Anecdoticaly I get β¬1800 in my bank account every month, but cost my employer β¬3200.
Kinda tricky to compare taxes from one country to another.
Income tax is one thing, social security is another and the taxes your employer pays as business are another. You're just conflating them all. Some countries have lower social security contributions but have no universal health insurance or you just have to pay out of pocket or it's tied to your work, etc. It's not apples to apples