Investing Wisely

The United States takes a lot of money from taxpayers and invests it back in the country. In contrast to many other countries in the club of the “First World”, we pump an unbelievable amount into our military. The Mother of All Defense Supplementals by Charles Peña (Anitwar) supplies some numbers for those with a strong stomach. The full military budget comprises several pieces:

• The official budget, which totals $439 billion for this fiscal year
• Budgets for the various secret services, like the CIA and the NSA, which are officially secret, but also run into the tens of billions
• Interest on debts incurred for past overexpenditures on the military (primarily begun during the Reagan years, that great fiscal conservative)
• Special appropriations packages and supplemental requests

Of these sources, only the first is ever mentioned in the mainstream media, in an effort to make the budget sound reasonable. The fact that almost half a trillion dollars spent on the military sounds reasonable to Americans is probably a combination of ignorance, inurement and weak math skills (addressed below). Of special interest are the supplemental requests, which have a fixed dollar value and are approved year after year by our elected representatives. Over the last several years, these “were $74 billion in 2003, $72 billion in 2004, $82 billion in 2005 – which included tsunami relief funding – and $66 billion in 2006”. These cover such unforseeable costs as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Don’t be fooled by the tsunami funding—it was attached to the funding bill in order to ensure that no wise-guy or -gal voted against it.

Every year, the military overshoots its budget by about 20% or so, and every year, they just get more money at some point during the year. Not a bad deal and quite a refreshing approach from the same group (the Congress) that imposed harsh bankruptcy and personal responsibility measures earlier this year. A lot of this money bleeds away in no-bid contracts to favored firms like Bechtel and Halliburton—returning to the States along a money-laundering route through war-torn, half-conquered countries.

For 2007, the supplemental request is $160 Billion. The current cost of the Iraq war is conservatively pegged at $340 Billion, which amounts to a little over $1000 per citizen of the US—for Iraq alone. It’s a good thing there’s no better place to invest that money than in the burgeoning democracy that America’s newest state in the Middle East. Oh, wait, here’s one: US high school dropout rate: high, but how high? (Christian Science Monitor)

“Nearly 1 in 3 high school students in the Class of 2006 will not graduate this year … The picture is worse for urban school districts, especially those serving poor students, the new study shows. Graduation rates in the largest school districts range from 21.7 percent in Detroit and 38.5 percent in Maryland’s Baltimore County to 82.5 percent in Virginia’s Fairfax County.”

Another study paints a much rosier picture, but only numbers ranging from 1992 to 1994 are cited, which ignores the last 12 years of domestic spending plunder and the disaster that is the No Child Left Behind program. Regardless of exact trends and statistics (which no one in America is educationally equipped to make heads or tales of anyway), the American education system is generally considered to be in sharp decline, even though “[g]overnors are making changes that will yield better counts within a few years”. Yielding better numbers is easy to do (see grade inflation at all scholastic levels)—what’s wanted is yielding better minds.

Surely, there are better ways to spend that $160 Billion? Hell, for that kind of money, throw in health insurance and college on top of a decent high school education. Go nuts.

Or we can just keep on blowing the shit out of people. That would be all right, too.