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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.
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 โฌ1800 in my bank account every month, but cost my employer โฌ3200.
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