If you’re curious about the cost of military spending — not just in dollars, but in tradeoffs for other things — schools, bridges, healthcare, and so forth — you could do worse than consult the National Priorities Project website. Not only can you find out what the budget numbers really are, but the NPP also gives you some funky tools: you can plug your city or state into their “Tax Day” calculator, and see how your federal tax is spent. San Franciscans will no doubt be delighted to learn that of the $7,818 in federal taxes a median family paid for the tax year 2008-2009, $2,298 went to the military, another $618 went to service the military’s share of the debt, and only $235 went toward education.
If you’d like to know a little (or a lot) more about the effect of redirecting some (or a lot) of that money towards civilian pursuits, you might look at “U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Domestic Spending Priorities,” a paper by Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier published by the Institute for Policy Studies; the Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts; and Women’s Action for New Directions, (A PDF of this article is available here.)
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