The National Security Council is meeting today to discuss our policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Pentagon tells us something important:
The Penatagon says the war in Afghanistan costs about $2 billion a week.
With fifty-two weeks in a year, we are apparently spending $104 billion annually in Afghanistan. In 2010, we spent (pdf) $106.9 billion on education, and $90.9 billion on transportation. The Department of Energy spent $38.3 billion.
However you want to look at our budget priorities, we have to face up to the fact that the annual cost of occupying Afghanistan is roughly the same as the federal annual cost of pubic education. We could double the resources that go to our schools without adding a single dollar of taxes by simply reallocating the money currently being spent in Afghanistan. Probably a better way of diverting the money would be to help people pay for college since there are no freaking jobs for people with high school degrees.
Perhaps he was a little over-the-top when he accused the Republicans of trying to turn America in Pakistan, but Nicholas Kristof noted something important in his Sunday column.
For a country that prides itself on social mobility, where higher education has been a traditional escalator to a better life, cutbacks in access to college are a scandal. G. Jeremiah Ryan, the president of Bergen Community College in New Jersey, tells me that when the college was set up in 1965, two-thirds of the cost of running it was supposed to be covered by state and local governments, and one-third by students. The reality today, Dr. Ryan says, is that students bear 78 percent of the cost.
The New York Times reports that the administration is seriously considering escalating the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. Bin-Laden is dead; Karzai’s hopeless; we can declare victory and leave since things aren’t going to get much better if we stay. I hope the sensible people win that argument, starting today in the NSC meeting. We’ve got much better investments to make.
