The VA budget is ~200B/yr right? Maybe a bit more? Homeland Security is ~50B? If we include all of both of those (and I would contend that "all" isn't really a

The VA budget is ~200B/yr right? Maybe a bit more? Homeland Security is ~50B? If we include all of both of those (and I would contend that "all" isn't really appropriate if we're just talking about the "military") we're around a trillion or so on the military. Let's take the 740B on government spending on primary + secondary education and add the 175B or so spent by various levels of governments on college. That gets you to 915B. Is there 100B of private spending a year on education? I'm willing to bet there is. At the end of the day, the numbers are probably pretty close. My overall point is that there is this idea that US military spending dwarfs US education spending. However you do the math, this is clearly not the case.