The gold peg stood in the way of the war machine. If you have to actually pay for your perpetual war with taxes, it's not going to work. You'll never get the support of the people to fund the insanity. Instead you pay for it all by not asking permission, you abuse the currency to fund the wars (artificially low interest rates, so you can afford the debt, which destroys the purchasing power of Americans by pushing the dollar down over time, so everything they buy costs them more; all without anywhere near enough of an export increase to offset it).

The huge pile of debt Reagan ran up - which back then was the largest accumulation of debt in US history outside of a major war time - is still sitting on the books effectively, perpetually costing us interest forever. That spending explosion was partially focused on unnecessary military spending. Reagan's military spending debt will never be paid off, the true cost of that over time (it'll still be sitting there costing interest 50+ years after it was first accumulated) will be dramatically beyond what occurred during his Presidency years.

Then there was the second Iraq war and the spending explosion during the Bush years. That debased the dollar and spurred an immense commodity bubble. Pick 20 random countries and google "xcountry GDP" and then look at the chart of each (then match it with gold and oil charts). What you will see is syncronous soaring of GDP figures and commodities, far beyond anything that is ever seen in normal terms. Most of that isn't actual GDP growth, what that is, is the dollar plunging (vs the other currencies) due to idiotic spending policies during the Bush years, specifically the trillion plus in unnecessary spending during those eight years. That debasing of the dollar mauled US standards of living for the middle class, which was then compounded by the housing collapse and recession.

The $750 billion we're about to spend on the military - while not being at war with anybody - is a continuation of roughly five decades of failed policy around our global deployment of military forces and routine foreign adventurism re military action in places like Syria or Libya.

That $750 billion should be a lot closer to $450 billion instead. We could just about balance the budget right now, if you combined that with letting the tax cuts reset, slightly raise taxes on the top 10%, and have the Fed push interest costs very slightly down. Instead they're going to keep burying us in mistakes.

So now here we are, looking to spend $8 trillion plus over the next ten years just on the military budget (again, while not at war). Meanwhile, we've got about $600 billion per year in debt interest to pay. Soon we'll be paying interest on $30 trillion in public debt. That's the global military machine being partially responsible for bankrupting the US Government. We're not spending $750 billion because we're at war with Nazi Germany or the USSR or some immense foe, it's because we're deployed globally and that's wildly expensive to maintain.