I made some simple math mistakes in a previous post, and appreciate Matt Johnson catching my error:
As someone who agrees with your general point about the amount we spend on the military industrial complex being outrageously high, I do have to point out that you might want to revisit the math or assumptions you made when you said this: “At a million dollars apiece, the cost of those 120+ cruise missiles the US launched into Libya would pay for every teacher in America for almost 20 years. And that doesn’t count the cost of the fighter jet that crashed.” There are over 3 million public school teachers in the US, so, at $120,000,000 that works out to only $40 per teacher.
Actually, the numbers are closer to 4 million teachers at $30 per. But Matt redeems me by looking at the bigger picture:
However, if you add up the total cost of the Iraq war, estimated to be $704 billion, it would pay for every public school teacher in America for over 4 years. The Iraq war has cost every man, woman, and child in America about $2,000 since it started. For a family of 4 that would be $8,000. I bet if you asked the average family if they would rather have $8 grand in their pocket or the progress we made in Iraq, the eight grand would win every time.