A reporter in attendance at The Dead Weather’s first concert described the band as sounding something similar to a gunfight between heaven and hell at the OK Corral. Having recently seen this band—another Jack White supergroup—perform at The Pageant, I can wholeheartedly agree. It was, in a word, awesome. In a few words: It takes an incredibly talented group of people to play as well as The Dead Weather does.
How does someone manage to have that sort of skill? Practice makes perfect, but without learning what needs to be practiced (in this case, the raw art of rock), Jack White would still be upholstering chairs in downtown Detroit. There is nothing more important than education when it comes to being talented at one’s career, or even hobby.
That is why it seems unthinkably counterintuitive to spend $739 billion on defense and only $49 billion on education. Initially, this might not be too surprising: States provide the majority of funding for education, while the federal budget provides for defense. The problem is that the money the federal government does provide for education can often mean the difference between a not so very good school and a much better one, or between an affordable college experience and years of paying off debt.
This should bother you. We’re buying more and more expensive weapons with fewer and fewer enemies, while we’re allowing schools nationwide to fall into disrepair. We’re spending billions of dollars on jet-fighter programs that, while admittedly cool, serve an increasingly smaller role in a world where our biggest threat hides in a briefcase. We’re letting kids fall by the wayside, while, instead we spend money on 1940s war tactics in a decidedly 2010 world.
This trend, incidentally, is consistent, according to a document that can be found at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2010/assets/hist.pdf. Starting with World War II, education spending has rarely climbed above a tenth of defense spending.
I am not against spending money on defense. But we need to be smarter when we do so. Billions of dollars on combat systems that sounded great when mid-Cold War strategists thought them up are nearly useless in a world in which we fight small groups of insurgents. If we can admit this, we can focus on new, counter-insurgency technologies, or on systems that could take the troops out of the war.
Never fight a land-war in Asia, the saying goes, but that’s what we’re cheerfully doing, spending more than $100 billion a year on something not even Alexander the Great could accomplish. President Barack Obama needs to change his tactics and be aggressive about stripping the defense budget down to what it actually needs, not what it really wants. According to CDI.org, the group mentioned earlier, the amount we’re spending on defense is more than three times the combined size of every single potential nation-level threat. That includes China and Russia.
We could be spending this money in so many better ways, in so many better places. Education, for me, is the most important tool a country has for helping its people be the best they can be, to borrow the army’s phrase of choice. With high-quality, well-funded education, we can prevent poverty, increase employment and increase the scientific literacy of the country.
As my dad tried to explain to a much younger me, you don’t need a new set of Legos, you just want one. We want a new jet-fighter, but we need to build more schools, establish smaller classrooms and hire more (and better) teachers, and until we can do that, we’re in deep, deep trouble. I opened this piece by talking about rock, and I’ll close it by asking the United States government to listen to the words of the great Mick Jagger: “You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”
