[stanley]

We spend 68 million dollars on the military per hour. An aircraft carrier group alone costs somewhere between 2-3 million per day to operate. We spend huge amounts on force projection, but argue over school funding and basic social services.

[DuskStar]

Well, school funding at least has been shown to be irrelevant to outcomes (at the ranges of funding we currently have in the US), so it makes sense that people would argue against increasing spending there. And when it comes to increasing "basic" social services - you do realize we spend multiple times the military budget on them already?

[Pfhreak]

Regarding the first, while funding per pupil doesn't directly correlate to outcome, it's not irrelevant to outcome. Additionally, students in lower income areas are more expensive to teach per pupil.

> Schools in high-poverty neighborhoods are more than twice as likely to be among the least-productive school districts [1]

Regarding the second, I sure hope that we spend multiples of our military budget on services! If we didn't that would be absolutely astonishing. Other than services for the people, what else should our government be spending money on?

But we spend more than many other countries. We put about 15% of our federal tax dollars into military spending, compared to, say, Germany (12%). If we scaled back a percent or three on our military, we'd have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on schools, infrastructure, healthcare, public defenders, etc. etc. etc.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/connecting-sc...

[DuskStar]

The point was that social services cost an absolute fuckton of money. Yes, you could (theoretically) cut the military budget by 20% and move that money elsewhere - but that wouldn't pay for much improvement. The US government spent 771.2 billion dollars on primary and secondary education in fiscal year 2019 [0], and 1,203.3 billion on education as a whole.

890.8 billion was spent on defence.

Cutting the defence budget by 20% and moving that to education, therefore, would be a 15% increase to the education budget.

15% isn't going to do shit to the structural issues that plague our education system. If anything, it'd be counterproductive - because it would shift power further towards the federal government in education and reduce the ability of states to try different things.

0: https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2019USbn_...

[GaryNumanVevo]

Yep, spending directly into unregulated insurance and healthcare companies who lobby for less regulation.

[simonsarris]

We also spend the second most of any country in the world on school funding per student. (Or the most, according to some sources for some years).

It's unclear that spending way too much on the military has any bearing there. Both are probably very poorly spent in terms of ROI.

[hestefisk]

And yet politicians complain that we can’t afford healthcare for everyone. It’s pathetic.

[DuskStar]

Funny thing about that - the US already spends 150-200% of the military budget on Medicare and Medicaid. So eliminating the military would be nowhere near enough to expand that to the rest of the country...

(The US spends about $2000/yr/person on the military, and $8500/yr/person on entitlements)