Military Spending v. Educational Spending

As April 15 looms large, consider checking out the website of the National Priorities Project, to see how the government's spending your money. For example, you may be enraged/horrified/shocked to know that $.30 of every $1 goes to military/defense, and $.037 of every $1 goes to education.

This to me makes a lot of sense, in an evil Bush-whacked sort of way. Our broken public education school system is set up to raise our children to be illiterate and ill-informed non-thinkers required to wear uniforms to attend school (like they do in Philadelphia), say the Pledge of Allegiance, and sing the Star-Spangled Banner.

Then those same school children grow up and are faced with limited job opportunities because they have not been taught critical thinking skills, or much of anything at all. Even if they're prepared for it, they can't afford college because it's too expensive, even with financial aid. Wal-mart down the street's not paying a living wage, and all of the mom-and-pop stores that do have been driven out of business. And their school couldn't afford computers, let alone textbooks, so they never really learned too much about them, or how to read very well. So they sit back and realize that they have been taught nothing except how to wear a uniform, salute the American flag, and sing the national anthem.

Then the military recruiter who has been given their name, address and phone number by the school system -- a nifty new federal law -- calls, and perhaps they realize that they're part of the new underclass that is being trained from elementary school (even without ROTC) to join the military. So they join up, where their lack of critical thinking skills is actually an asset, because they can obey their commanding officers without thinking too critically about the rightness of those commands. Or that they're being told to walk into battle with unarmored vehicles.

In any case, perhaps they won't question it when the military sends them halfway across the world to kill or be killed in the fight to protect the administration's interest in oil.

This sounds about right to me. Sure explains why we spend 10 times as much on the military as we do on education.