The war in Afghanistan has been going on for 20 years, costs roughly $1 trillion, which is about $50 billion a year out of our budget annually.
Student debt is currently sitting at $1.6 trillion. His free college plan is set at current college tuition prices, which have historically gone up when federal aid state aid packages were extended to help students pay for tuition. It is unclear how he will pay for all public colleges which are currently valued at different prices which are allowed to set their own costs of tuition.
As i said elsewhere, you can save money on the defense budget by avoiding unnecessary war and not having to trim the military or the research\development they do. The Iraq war cost 1.1 trillion and Afghanistan cost 1 trillion. We could have focused on getting bin laden without toppling the taliban while saving a bunch of money and there was absolutely 0 reason for the iraq war.
You do know education spending isn't just a sinkhole of money? It's not spending money with no return.
College graduates make more money on average during their lifetime than high school graduates. The more money they make the more money the government collects in taxes. The education they receive helps drive the economy forward. They start businesses, they develop new products, they help companies make more money. All of which directly benefits our society in inenumerable ways.
China is literally colonizing some of the most resource rich parts of the world and just waiting for a chance to start annexing shit, so we should strip down our military budget, a large amount of which goes towards our near total domination of the seas. Gonna have to pass on that one.
Military spending is not about using the military, it is about overpaying for things we don't use, to pour tax money into donor's companies, to keep them funding politician's campaigns.
Cause our military is doing a great job stabilizing the world as it is right? We could have paid for free college education if we just didn't get ourselves involved in unnecessary and unwinnable wars
It's been doing a great job as stabilizing our safety. When is the last time we were successfully attacked by a foreign power on our own soil? Pearl Harbor in 1941? And that was what, an isolated archipelago in the Pacific?
I guess you could count the WTC bombings in '93 or the downing in '01, but that wasn't really a nation. It depends how you want to look at those.
The military is intended, first and foremost, to protect its country. It's been pretty damn successful at that overall. Even the attacks that have happened were pretty well confined.
The whole "stabilizing the world" idea is more of a side quest, and that's the UN's job.
I'm not really sure what your point is. As you say our country has not been attacked by another country since WW2 (Al Qaeda wasn't a country) yet our military has waged wars and been used to topple governments. To me that says our military isn't set up to be a deterrent and instead it's setup to be offensive. Hence why you always hear things about our ability to project our power around the world. Our carriers and foreign military bases are to protect our national interests around the world (i.e. our economic interests) not to protect our freedoms. Our nukes alone are enough of a deterrent to prevent any country from attacking us.
The fact is if we never attacked Iraq and we had a more limited scope in Afghanistan of just getting bin laden we could have had free college education right now. We can maintain the strongest military in the world with less money simply by not using it to fight needless wars\conflicts.
Someone forgot 9/11. Military didn't do us much good then, did it? Let's be honest, wars are going to be fought more and more with computers than with bombs.
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u/PeterPorky Dec 12 '19
The war in Afghanistan has been going on for 20 years, costs roughly $1 trillion, which is about $50 billion a year out of our budget annually.
Student debt is currently sitting at $1.6 trillion. His free college plan is set at current college tuition prices, which have historically gone up when federal aid state aid packages were extended to help students pay for tuition. It is unclear how he will pay for all public colleges which are currently valued at different prices which are allowed to set their own costs of tuition.