Mr. "Surrender", a commenter from my Patriot News blog, has come back again for another beating.  He says:

"Well, I am not an economist, and as I've mentioned before, I don't support a single payer government health program, but if I did,  I would suggest a good place to start searching for potential reallocation optioins [sic] might be at this bullet point in Obama's budget....$671,100,000,000. I am sure you already know where I am going with this, but for other readers, this represents just under half of our entire federal budget. and it is of course the Department of Defense budget. If you want to know what brought the U.S.S.R to its demise, check out their economy and their defense budget during their last years. They couldn't afford to keep up with our spending.When you say that the current healthcare system is the best we can have, what you are really saying is...that it is the best we can afford to have at this time given our decision to allocated our tax money to other programs. So long as we choose to spend half on Defense (whether I agree or not is of no consequence), then you are correct...this is the best we can do without raising more tax money. As far as I can tell just like in my household, our country decides what is most important and spends accordingly.  We have decided defense is the number one priority. So be it, but don't tell me there aren't other options. There are, we just haven't made the choice to do it any other way."

And my reply:

Interesting that you admit you're not an economist, nor are you an expert in military affairs, though you don't admit to that.  I, on the other hand, have two particular areas of expertise:  1) economic analysis and 2) military affairs.  I'm not sure where you get your $671.1 billion number; the DOD (White House) budget website claims a $515.4 billion  budget for FY 09:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/rewrite/budget/fy2009/defense.html

I can't tell if this includes plus ups for Iraq, but I believe it does, since the standard budget was always somewhere aroung $300 billion.  The infoplease.com web site, on the other hand, claims an FY 09 DOD budget of $494.3 billion, a minor difference probably explained by rounding and cat and dog expenditures that could be accounted for different ways.  

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0873746.html

On the other hand, again according to infoplease, the federal budget totals $2,921.8 billion, so some quick arithmetic (I'm a mathematician, too, as it turns out) shows that the DOD budget therefore comes to some 17.6% of the federal budget, which is, in my humble opinion, much less than 50%.

You're right, however, in saying that the American people, in their infinite wisdom - the same infinite wisdom that caused them to elect Barack Obama President - could choose to spend less for national defense, through their selection of various government officials.  In fact, in the 1990s, they did just that, as one William Jefferson Clinton presided over an overall reduction of almost 40% in DOD spending.  This reduction in government spending, even with an increase in social programs, allowed Clinton and the Republican Congress to balance the budget, with the happy result that the economy continued its 20-year (at that time) boom.  Of course, in the new millennium, the reduction in our armed forces caused DOD to have to continually deploy the few soldiers we had left to hot spots in Iraq and Afghanistan, but you can't have everything, can you?

I already know what caused the demise of the USSR.  They couldn't afford to keep up with us, as you said, because as a socialist country, their economy lacked the productivity provided by entrepreneurship that ours, as a capitalist free market system, had and has.  That entrepreneurship is fueled by capital available from private investors, capital that exists only as long as it remains in the hands of the private sector.  Increasing taxes to fund other government initiatives causes a one-for-one reduction in investment dollars available to the private sector to spend to work its magic.  Oh, and by the way, one of the beneficiaries of our outstanding productivity is the medical sector, for which modern medicines and improved diagnostic systems are continually being developed.

Of course, reductions in spending could come from DOD, as you have said.  I read what I wrote, and I have never said or even implied otherwise.  I believe you're coming up with this because I asked you what you would do.  Now you have replied that we could reduce DOD's budget, although your numbers are wrong.  I don't agree, because the world is too dangerous a place, in my opinion, to reduce our armed forces any further than they already have been, but knock yourself out trying to sell that idea to the American people.  Maybe you can convince the majority of them.

One final thought here.  The Constitution grants very limited and narrow powers to the federal government, but one of those that is explicitly granted is national defense.  Taxing some of the population to pay the doctor bills for another segment, however, isn't mentioned, or even hinted at, anywhere.  That makes expenditures for national defense constitutional, and expenditures for "national health care" unconstitutional, in my opinion.  No true conservative would say otherwise, and that means that you, sir, are no conservative.