It is said that several factors, one of the major being excessive military spending led to the fall of the great Roman Empire. History tends to repeat itself... Spoiler
First off, the whole concept of Rome "falling" is a rather primitive variation of history. What really happened was a gradual process of decentralization, where power slowly evaporated from the center in Rome to various Germanic chieftains whom attempted to continue the imperial legacy - hence why virtually every Middle Age king such as Charlemagne claimed to be their heirs. The centralized Roman power structure had major inherent weaknesses which were made far worse when 1. the Empire was actually formed and 2. they stopped conquering. The biggest, quite simply, is that the Emperors lost legitimacy, which is something any state must have if they are going to persuade people to concede their power to a faraway city. The early Emperors derived their legitimacy from Caesar's legacy, but that collapsed on Caligula's death. At that point, it became the equivalent to a military dictatorship than a monarchy, and thus was inevitably doomed by the fact that sooner or later, an idiot or a weak ruler would get in power, which is what occurred with Aurelius's death. A weak ruler with weak legitimacy inevitably invites civil war as high nobleman or the peasantry no longer wish to concede power, which is a huge danger to an empire this large. And that's pretty much what happened. The Empire got torn apart by civil war. There's a lot of other problems the Empire had that people don't get, especially economically, but I've never seen a credible academic source that actually stated that excessive military spending was a major factor in Roman decline.
Put a democrat in the white house and all a sudden people shrug off the elephant in the room. Reroute 10% of that and you don't have near the domestic hardships we do. Mr. Pres says: "Quit whinning, quit grumbling, quit complainin..." Yeah peps, just suck it up while we continue to fund the war machine but not help the annoying grumblers.
Excessive compared to what, exactly? Wasn't war one of the few ways you made money back then? Didn't some of these fools just tag along? Pre-combustion based weaponry and transport, couldn't you just bring most of that **** from the farm with you?
Gibbon provided many plausible factors. But it's a ****tacularly huge book. I'd recap for you - but it would take about 130 pages.
I am for cutting defense spending but this is a fairly weak argument to use the fall of Rome as a reason for cutting defense spending. If we consider the fall of Rome as when the Visigoths sacked it then it would make more sense to say they weren't spending enough on defense.
Lead poising, which lead to mental defects amongst the Roman aristocrats. I wonder what the US's lead poisoning will be. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html
Seriously...that's a vastly misleading graph. I'm not saying that defense spending shouldn't be cut to some degree, but it only accounts for 19% of the total federal budget. Those "durn socialist" programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) are what cost the most year after year.
..............You DO realize that there was about 350 years between the end of Nero's reign and the complete end of the centralized Roman apparatus?
Not completely. The debasement of the currency led to the loss of confidence in the currency, dispersion of the people from urban centers to more rural areas, and movement back to an agrarian economy. That being said, it was a long process, and Nero was just the first to debase the currency. To be fair, I think the Roman Empire was always in decline. Roman society reached its peak as a Republic.
