Defense spending and education spending

If you were alive in the 1970s or 1980s, you probably saw this bumper sticker more times than you can count. You still see it occasionally today, and you still see the sentiment expressed all the time on social media. As a policy matter, there's was never anything wrong with the bumper sticker, then or now. It's absolutely fine to be in favor or more education spending and less defense spending. In fact, I currently hold that view. The problem was that the bumper sticker also implied that we spend a lot more money on defense than we do on education. That’s not true. In fact, the opposite is true—we spend a lot more on education than we do on defense. It’s actually pretty hard to decide exactly what counts as defense (veteran’s benefits?) and what counts as education (adult training programs?), but K-12 expenditures alone exceed total military defense spending by 15-25%, and if you throw in public spending on higher education, the education number becomes more like 40-50% higher. One…