Arm Our Children to Succeed and Arm the Military to Prevail
Mackenzie Eaglen /
As a nation, we shouldn’t have to choose between defense and education. Yet, in a recent ABC News This Week roundtable, the President’s top political advisor, David Axelrod, criticized cuts to the education budget, suggesting that education spending is our defense budget of the future.
There is absolutely no doubt that education is essential to a strong nation. However, it is the duty of the federal government to fund a strong national defense, and it is up to the states to govern their education systems. So why is spending on those in uniform, especially during a time of war, not defended like education spending?
The defense budget has not experienced the recent growth of the education budget. In fact, the President’s 2011 Pentagon budget only proposes growth of 3.4 percent over last year. (The defense budget has grown since 2001, of course, due largely to a decade of continuous warfare coming off a previous decade of massive defense cuts.) Truly worrisome is that between 2010 and 2015, despite our increasing demands on the military, defense spending will fall from 4.9 percent to 3.6 percent of GDP—even though defense spending is already at an historic low today.
Yet since the 1960s, federal per-pupil education spending has more than tripled. (more…)