We never saw investment in the infrastructure under GWB, quite the opposite, capital rushed for the exits. That's why I said I'm worried what the top 1% will do with the money, if Trump is able to return investment into America, he just might make America great again, although someone would still need to fix our currency - or it peters our pretty fast.
Trump is basically repeating the Bush error -- imagining that cutting taxes for the very rich will have magical benefits for the economy. It's been a repeated disastrous failure, so I don't see why we should expect it will work better this time. If you want to invest in public infrastructure, just push through public infrastructure programs, financed by taxes. It's not about what happens to private sector capital.
if Trump can grow the economy by 5% a year (which he promised to do)
It's not going to happen. His first quarter came in under 2%, and was slower than Obama's last quarter. Second quarter will probably come in a bit higher, if the GDPNow number is right (it's hit or miss this early), but not a lot higher -- around 2.9%.
The reason for the military budget is our program to upgrade our carriers from Nimitz class to Ford class
It's not just that. The military budget is expanding for each of the services, not just the Navy. However, it's true that the vastly wasteful upgrade to Ford class carriers is a gigantic boondoggle that's costing us many tens of billions of dollars per year. There is no justification for that upgrade. The Nimitz class carriers are already GENERATIONS beyond what our enemies have.
I'm not exaggerating there. Look at the specs. The George H. W. Bush, a Nimitz carrier has a displacement of 102,000 long tons, is capable of over 30 knots, and has the unlimited range of a nuclear-powered vessel. That's 2.4 times the size of the Russian and Chinese carriers, faster than them, and unlike those foreign models, the Bush isn't limited in range by diesel engines The Bush also carries an air wing crew of 2,480, compared to just 626 for the Russian carrier. On that basis, you could argue the generation of carriers we're trying to upgrade FROM are four times as capable as anything anyone else in the world could deploy.
To find a US carrier on par with what the top-of-the-line is for the Russians and Chinese, you need to go back long, long before the Nimitz class. The USS Enterprise, which entered service way back in 1962, was faster and over twice as large as today's Chinese and Russian ships, and was nuclear. The USS Kitty Hawk was also considerably larger and faster than those Russian and Chinese ships, and capable of carrying a lot more aircraft. The Forrestal, from the mid-1950s, was also bigger, faster, longer-ranged, and had a much larger complement of aircraft than the Russian and Chinese vessels of today.
Hell, take a look at the USS Coral Sea, launched in 1946 -- it's slightly bigger than the Kuznetsov (45,000 tons displacement compared to 43,000), and faster (33 knots compare to 29) and carried more aircraft (45-55 in the 1980s, compared to 41 for the Kuznetsov). Same with the Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Midway. You have to go back over 70 years to find a time when our top-of-the-line aircraft carriers weren't up to the standards of today's Russian and Chinese vessels. There are men dying of old age today who were toddlers the last time we were building something as crappy as the Russians and Chinese are relying on today.
So why the rush to move six or seven generations ahead of anything anyone else can field? The motivation isn't military, it's political: it's about serving up the pork for politically-connected "defense" contractors. Even if all we had were two refitted carriers from 1945, we'd already be a match for the Russians and Chinese combined. The 1960s-era carriers would be enough to put us in the clear lead, the Nimitz carriers were ridiculous overkill, and now we're layering even more overkill on top of that.
Trump put out a bare bones military budget to stay on pace with that... whoever won this time around was going to inherit the military budget.
Trump could have held the military budget in check if he'd wanted to. He'd simply have to demand spending reductions in exchange for his signature on spending bills. We've seen how that works. The military budget was shrunk in real terms in the Clinton years, for example. But it's a lot easier to just hand that pork over.