The Pentagon, by any measure, our government's least efficient agency, just announced that it was canceling advanced development projects that it had already spent 58 Billion on, about 4 billion a year over the past 14 years. It is not possible to know in advance which development projects will bear fruit. Financial risk is associated with the word "development," but risk becomes high once the word "advanced" is attached. We could probably do better at the outset in deciding which projects go forward, nevertheless advanced development is important, and 4 Billion/yr is a small fraction of the Pentagons budget. What caught my eye was that 58 Billion is somewhat more than it would cost to halve the class size in all of our 66K public grade schools, including the necessary classroom physical modifications. Fifty eight Billion/yr would be 869K$ per grade school, and this would be enough to halve the class size in every grade school in the country and at the same time hire roughly 400K new teachers. What do you suppose the economic impact, short and long term, of that would be versus spending 58 Billion less per year in the defense department budget? We can not know the answer to this question without in depth study. The component with greatest uncertainty is the long term economic impact of halving grade school class size. On the other hand, we can know quite accurately what the immediate term impact of removing 58 Billion from the defense Department budget would be. Obviously, the question of whether it would pay us to divert 58 Billion from the Defense budget into public education is one for skilled economists to wrestle with; it is, however, the kind of question, as a nation, we should be asking if we want to maximize the ROI for our tax dollars.
We could borrow a line from Trump. Make Europeans pay their fair share of military spending and re-direct the money toward education. This would level muricans and europeans in terms of education. Americans will no longer be the butt of the jokes about stupidity. Alternatively, it could bankrupt Europe and require more bank bailouts, which I heard offer good ROI. If seriously, I've never understood why small classroom sizes are presented as the grand solution. My class had a few more than 30. Can't someone come up with a better example of how education money should be spent?
US will give $38 billion in aid to Israel over 10 years. That's a country with 7 million people, Europe is 400 million with roughly equal population and gets just a bit more in aid, around $5 billion. It's unreal how Americans are propping up Israel. As if the technologically savvy nation with relatively high incomes can't do it themselves.
Thanks for the data fhl. I am a little shocked to see military spending same as education as a % of GDP. Would like to see that figure for any other advance country. Suspect education should be much higher than military as percent of GDP. That data is really disturbing. Also, don't forget that S.S. is our own money invested and coming back to us. That's why it is called an entitlement. The Pension for a country of 300 million should be a pretty large % of GDP I would think. If it wasn't something would be drastically wrong. But those relative numbers for military and education as truly shocking. I wonder how many Americans are aware of those numbers!
The charts seem clear to me that this is not a guns or butter issue. The butter of transfer payments are going to overrun everything whether defense is cut or not.