alt Hacker NewsIt would cost less to provide free breakfast and lunch to all public school students in the US, but that might actually improve the country's future instead of blowing things up.
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If we took all the money we spent on war for 2 years, and diverted it to buying $10k electric cars, we could buy everyone in America an electric car, remove our dependence on oil, and thus never need to fight wars for it ever again; let other countries fight it out for oil while we move on to bigger and better things.
or we could continue spending all of our money on wars to get oil, fall further and further behind, and be living like the Flintstons in a few years while all the other countries that actually invested in useful stuff forge forward.
US schools are some of the best funded in the world. The causative relationship of funding on student performance is not strong.
Social programs such as Medicare, SSI, etc dwarf the military budget.
I would love to have a Japan-style universal lunch program. But this point is an empty appeal to emotion. Kids are being fed. The U.S. spends $100 billion a year on SNAP and $18 billion a year on the National School Lunch Program. We just focus most of the money on cash benefits to parents of children rather than feeding kids at school.
"Why does man have reason if he can only be influenced by violence?"
We spend drastically more money than this on education; it isn't even in the same ballpark. People get tripped up about this because the funding comes from different taxing bodies (most education funding is state and local) --- but all taxation is linked.
We also couldn't fully fund free school meals for this sum, this sum is an ambit claim by the administration not a budget, and a large component of this funding request is for capital expenditures, not ongoing operational expenditure. The (larger) school meal funding dollars would have to be paid regularly.