STUDENTS OR HELICOPTERS?

Next time you hear of funds running out for student loans, or for supplemental unemployment payments, or for retaining teachers; the next time you hear that the government needs to cut Social Security benefits, or Medicare benefits, or raise the SS retirement age to 70--think of the 53.3% of the federal budget that goes to financing the most enormous war machine the world has ever seen.

This gargantuan figure, which works out to $1.6 trillion out of an estimated $3 trillion budget (for fiscal year 2011), includes interest payments for prior wars and standing army, veterans benefits and health care, non-DOD military spending, "black box" intelligence agency funding, supplemental funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the $708 billion Pentagon budget request.

In the next budget and future ones, is this where you want your money to go? The opportunity costs of spending vast amounts of money on unneeded military expenditures, more than 10 times the amount of the next highest spender (China at $130 billion) is a wicked enormity, a barbarity of our time and doing. The money which will be spent next year on replacing helicopters ($4.8 billion) would go a long way to fully fund student loans.

Which is it going to be: fund students or buy helicopters employed in dubious use in again killing nearly 600 Afghan civilians?