Defense spending and education spending
If you were alive in the 1970s or 1980s, you probably saw this bumper sticker more times than you can count. You still see it occasionally today, and you still see the sentiment expressed all the time on social media.
As a policy matter, there's was never anything wrong with the bumper sticker, then or now. It's absolutely fine to be in favor or more education spending and less defense spending. In fact, I currently hold that view.
The problem was that the bumper sticker also implied that we spend a lot more money on defense than we do on education. That’s not true. In fact, the opposite is true—we spend a lot more on education than we do on defense.
It’s actually pretty hard to decide exactly what counts as defense (veteran’s benefits?) and what counts as education (adult training programs?), but K-12 expenditures alone exceed total military defense spending by 15-25%, and if you throw in public spending on higher education, the education number becomes more like 40-50% higher.
One reason for the confusion is that defense and education are largely funded by different levels of government. Defense is almost exclusively a concern of the federal government; state and local government essentially spend zero on the military. Conversely, only about 10% of total education spending is federal; state and local governments provide the preponderance of resources.
So if you only look at federal spending on education, defense looks massive. This is a common mistake. But it’s also a one-way mistake. I’ve never seen anyone look at a state or local budget and wonder why we don’t spend any money on defense. My hunch is that people understand local governments don’t support the military budget, but they mistakenly think the federal government foots the education expenditures.
Even within federal spending, people get the amount of military spending completely wrong. DoD spending is only about 16% of the federal budget. The majority of the federal budget is spending on social security and Medicare, the major entitlement transfer programs for seniors. A lot of people mistakenly think we spend half the federal money on defense, and that’s because we spend about half the discretionary budget on defense. But discretionary spending is only about 1/3 of federal spending. Most federal spending is the major entitlement programs, plus interest on the debt.
As the old saying goes, the federal government is best described as a social program for old people that happens to have a sizable standing army on the side and a pile of cheap debt.
This is probably a good spot to remind people that you can’t solve the federal budget shortfall without either (a) raising taxes; or (b) cutting entitlement programs.
Now, massive cuts to defense—like 50%—could get you somewhere (that would reduce federal spending by about 8%) but that’s completely unrealistic.
And non-defense discretionary spending? It’s a drop in the bucket. There’s nothing wrong with cutting programs that aren’t worth the money, but it’s not a credible plan to do top-line budget work. For example, if you think you are going to reduce the size of the federal government by 20% with a plan of attacking non-defense discretionary programs, I’ve got bad news for you: all of non-defense discretionary is roughly 15% of the budget. And that includes all the non-military law enforcement (FBI, ICE, CBP, ATF, etc.), and all of the justice system.