Military Spending vs. Public Education

The Lockheed F-35 multi-strike fighter is A Weapon That Costs More Than Australia.

The US intends to buy 2,443 Lockheed F-35s. The tab will be a cool trillion dollars.

That's one shit-grip full of duckets.

$1,000,000,000,000

One trillion is 13 digits -- a 1 followed by 12 zeros. GAO estimates that the F-35 program will cost US taxpayers $1E12 to purchase, operate, & maintain.

Australia's entire 12-digit GDP is $924 billion.

The culture of endless money that has taken hold must be replaced by a culture of restraint.
~ U.S. Defense Secretary, Robert Gates

Nary a peep from our elected officials on yet another military blank-check boondoggle.

Are there higher priorities, like a WPA-like jobs program or re-investing in public education?


Try This With That $1 Trillion

About 6 million of the best & brightest teachers would be needed if the US chose to publicly educate all of our 60 million children, aged 0-14, with a 10:1 student to teacher ratio.

In this thought experiment, we could choose to pay the best and the brightest 6 million teachers an attractive salary of say, $100,000 per year.

Sound ambitious? Sound crazy?

If we dumped the F-35 program, we could have the opportunity to re-build a world-class public school system -- and still have $166,666 in change.

Just sayin'.

Joint Strike-Out F-35

A $100 bag of confetti looks like this

If you could hold 3 billion of these bags, you would be holding the amount of confetti the US Congress authorized the Pentagon to spend over the next 25 years on a fleet of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) aircraft.

A few questions beg asking

1. Which fiscal conservatives in Congress authorized the Pentagon to spend $300,000,000,000 for 2,456 Joint Strike Fighters?
2. Why is the procurement of F-35s a more pressing priority than Health and Education?
3. Why is weapons procurement handed a blank check, but it takes 13 excruciating months of show-boating and dicking around in Congress to ultimately have legalized organized crime (a.k.a. the Insurance Industry), and their greedy pals in Big Pharma, BUY enough US Senators to kill insurance reform?

The JSF is such a boondoggle that President Obama's Defense Secretary Robert Gates is working overtime to get the F-35 program back on course.

Who is the real enemy? The Defense Industry? A Congress beholden to the Defense Industry? Comatose citizens?