Let's compare military spending with K-12 ed spending.

[Hannah Bell]

In 2006, public K-12 ed spending (all sources: local, state, federal) = 559 billion. Includes spending on facilities, debt, i.e *all* spending.

Pg 14, Table 1, Column 6

http://www2.census.gov/govs/school/07f33pub.pdf



2006 DOD BUDGET = 419 billion.

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy06/browse.html

http://www.defense.gov/news/Feb2005/d20050207budget.pdf

http://www.csbaonline.org/4Publications/PubLibrary/U.20050207.BudReqFY06/U.20050207.BudReqFY06.pdf


PLUS WAR SUPPLEMENTAL: 72 billion Feb. supplemental = 491 billion

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/amendments/supplemental2_2_16_06.pdf

http://www.house.gov/budget_republicans/emrgsuppau031506.pdf

(It's actually 81 billion in military-related added funding if you include DOD, Vets, "foreign operations" & "homeland security".)


Other military:

Dept. of Veterans' affairs: 33 billion = 524 billion + supplemental


OK, So now we're up to 524 billion-plus in directly budgeted costs. That's equal to 94% of all public K-12 spending in the country.



But we're not done. We know that "the Pentagon has access to black budget military spending for special programs which is not listed as Federal spending and is not included in published military spending figures."

Military spending is also included in other departments' budgets, but tracking it all down is a major chore.

To give you some idea of how big of a chore, here's one dept with a part-military function: Dept of Homeland Security, official 2006 budget = 35 billion.

But read the backstory: HOMELAND SECURITY FUNDING ANALYSIS

http://frwebgate1.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/TEXTgate.cgi?WAISdocID=257974411968+1+1+0&WAISaction=retrieve

Its budget is $25 billion spent inside the department & $10 billion larded through almost every other department & agency, including Education &, inexplicably (at least to me), 83 million to the Smithsonian.

Homeland Security Functions also received 2006 supplemental funding in addition to budgeted funding.



Defense-related expenditures outside of the published Department of Defense budget:

"This does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance, cleanup, and production, which is in the Department of Energy budget, Veterans Affairs, the Treasury Department's payments in pensions to military retirees and widows and their families (an amount not disclosed on official statistics), interest on debt incurred in past wars, or State Department financing of foreign arms sales and militarily-related development assistance.

Neither does it include defense spending that is not military in nature, such as the Department of Homeland Security, counter-terrorism spending by the FBI, and intelligence-gathering spending by NASA."

Per this source:

http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/policy/securityspending/articles/spending_more_than_most_know/

"In all, the United States spent an estimated $990 billion last year on defense and other security-related activities.

And even THIS figure is incomplete. It doesn't include, for instance, pay and benefits for non-DoD federal employees working on security issues for the Department of Homeland Security, State Department, or Department of Justice or Treasury.

Nor does it include interest payments on past debt from paying veterans' benefits or retirees' pensions. It doesn't include the majority of the State Department's operating budget, although we must assume that at least some of our government's diplomatic initiatives are directed at promoting U.S. security."


Per this one: http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941

"In the fiscal year 2006, which ended last September, the Pentagon spent $499.4 billion. Lodged elsewhere in the budget, however, other lines identify funding that serves defense purposes just as surely as—sometimes even more surely than—the money allocated to the Department of Defense.

On occasion, commentators take note of some of these additional defense-related budget items, such as the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons programs, but many such items, including some extremely large ones, remain generally unrecognized...

The Justice Department, for example, includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which devotes substantial resources to an anti-terrorist program. The Department of the Treasury informs us that it has “worked closely with the Departments of State and Justice and the intelligence community to disrupt targets related to al Qaeda, Hizballah, Jemaah Islamiyah, as well as to disrupt state sponsorship of terror.”

To estimate the size of the entire de facto defense budget, I gathered data for fiscal 2006...Adding this interest component to the previous all-agency total, the grand total comes to $934.9 billion, which is more than 87 percent greater than the Pentagon’s outlays alone."



So according to two sources, one on the "left" & one on the "right," total military-related outlays at the federal level *alone* (states also do related spending) = around 900 billion plus, or nearly double *all* K-12 spending of any kind.

[Hannah Bell]

1. kick

[Hannah Bell]

5. kick

[Hannah Bell]

6. kick

[arcadian]

2. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor.

[izzybeans]

3. K and R

[HowHasItComeToThis]

4. MILITARY! STOP EATING AMERICA

http://twitter.com/NeilAbbey

[leftstreet]

7. Disgusting

K&R

[ManiacJoe]

8. The military is one of the few required federal budget items

according to the constitution. K-12 education is the responsibility of the states. Cutting the federal military budget would not necessarily get any more money passed down to the states for education.