alt Hacker NewsAm I missing something, the article randomly says: "For context, the US federal government spent $53 million on public education in 2022." and links to: https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... which says K-12 schools spend $857.2 billion.
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The federal government is distinct from state or local governments. The numbers still might not be consistent (it says “[t]he federal government provides 13.6% of funding for public K-12 education”, which would be more than $53MM) but the page you linked draws that distinction too. State and local funds make up the difference.
Yeah that bit seems wrong. I agree with the overall sentiment of the article, but that is off.
US Dept of Ed has a $238B budget in 2024. I think much of that is at the collegiate level, but $53M is almost certainly wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Ed...
You didn't miss anything, the author of the piece was just wrong. They either screwed up the math or didn't read their own link correctly, or both. Moreover, it is trivial to search for the US Dept of Education's budget for 2022 and fact check this.
It's also cited as evidence that Amazon is now more powerful than the US Government which is just factually fucking false. It really is a different breed of person that thinks some millions of dollars > sovereign power. It's like, yeah, they lobby, but they also have people lobbying against them, including near-competitors. The dynamic is not as simple as spend some $X millions of dollars and get some amount of equivalent benefit. You lobby because an entity with sovereign power can trivially destroy your business.