– Military spending The meme originated in a widely-shared tweet posted back in October 2020, and was also reposted on Facebook at that time. This fact check will focus specifically on the second half of the meme, “What the U.S. is #1 in” — the potentially surprising and arguably dubious superlatives attached to the United States. On the whole, the meme contained a mixture of accuracy and inaccuracy, much of which depended on the way in which certain rankings were viewed. For example, the U.S. spends by far the most of any country on its military, in absolute terms, but not when overall government spending or the size of the American economy is taken into account.