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Comment by irishcoffee | Hacker News Reader

> If we spent... $200 billion less on defense, which we easily could afford to do, the Federal Government could kick that money down to the states for other purpose

I read comments like this all the time, and while I don't disagree, I'm not sure anyone realizes just how many jobs will be cut if "we spend xxxbn less on defense." All of that money goes somewhere, the vast majority of it goes into either parts (created by labor) or labor itself. I realize on HN "defense spending" is the prime evil, but that money also supports (if I had to swag it) hundreds of thousands of US jobs.

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> I realize on HN "defense spending" is the prime evil

Please don't make up generalizations about the community as a rhetorical device in arguments. HN is divided on most issues—people just tend to notice the comments they disagree with or dislike.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434569 and marked it off-topic.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Pa...

> I realize on HN "defense spending" is the prime evil, but that money also supports (if I had to swag it) hundreds of thousands of US jobs.

If we spent that same money in a different industry it would support hundreds of thousands of jobs there too.

At the extreme we could also spend this money paying people to dig holes and full them and still support just as many jobs.

As a country we have to stop thinking of govt spending as a flat cost and instead get back to thinking of it as an investment.

What does this money gain the country and when? Are we efficiently allocating our capital to maximise our return. When consider at the margin, will additional investment/production in area X get us better return than an additional dollar in Y?

In my opinion education has one of the highest returns available to a govt. And a pittance of the cost compared to other high return options.

In fact, education could provide more jobs since it's expenses are mostly modestly provide workers whereas a large portion of defense spending goes to materials, highly paid specialists and contractor profits.

Of course, we would also need to cull the large mass of education pseudo-specialists who would want to suck up those Federal dollars. But if we could somehow move spending from defense to education, we might also be able to remove the parasitic consultant-layer on top of this field.

> In my opinion education has one of the highest returns available to a govt. And a pittance of the cost compared to other high return options.

Studies repeatedly show that spending is uncorrlated with student outcomes: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/04/25/468157856/can-more....

> Studies repeatedly show that spending is uncorrlated with student outcomes

That may be true of education budget in general, but what about these Oklahoma schools that are only open 4 days a week? Would boosting these school budgets be worthwhile?

Cutting to 4 days is a political statement, not a rational reaction to a budget shortfall. Faculty salaries make up the vast majority of school operating expenses. These teachers are not getting paid 20% less to work 4 days a week. So the savings are from ancillary expenditures (electricity, hourly workers, materials, etc.) and are going to be a lot less than 20% of total costs.

The way a rational private organization would respond to such decreased revenue would be to have layoffs and increase class sizes. (While there is some evidence that smaller classes are on the whole better, we're be talking about a pretty small difference here, in a range where the expected effects would be small.)

Oklahoma schools have been laying off teachers and increasing class sizes for many, many years. Typical class sizes there now are already 30-40% larger than the legal (state law, which has itself been adjusted upwards several times) limit. In most of these places, there are 3-5 class groups in a cohort (that is, there are 3-5 4th grade teachers). Even aside from the terrible impact on teacher attention, these classrooms have already run out of space to hold students -- students are already sharing desks that are explicitly designed for one student. Laying off a teacher and redistributing their 26+ students to the remaining 2-4 classrooms doesn't work any more.

The article you link to is not so unequivocal:

"While the money in Camden, N.J., has led to relatively little academic progress, our stories from North Carolina, Indiana and Massachusetts offer a compelling counterpoint to the idea that money doesn't really matter.

So, too, do a pair of recent studies that look not at one state but at many where parents, activists and school leaders from low-income districts sued and won increases in school funding."

If the purpose of defense spending is just to provide jobs, then hire those people to do something else. When we say we want to spend less on defense, we want to spend that same money on something else (education in this case); where do you think that money is going to go? It is going to create jobs as well, and much more efficiently than defense spending does. When you pay someone to teach, you get both a job (the teacher) and an improved resource that can produce more later (the student). When you pay someone to make a weapon, you get the job, but the weapon isn't going to help produce more later (in fact, it will waste resources it blows up)

Defense spending is the ultimate welfare program, draped in a flag.

I'm sure that spending $200 billion on teacher salaries will recycle that money back into the community much faster & more efficiently than it will spending it on missiles.

The measures talked about are not intended to reduce teacher salaries, that is basically impossible. Paying teachers more is not going to make the schools open on Friday.

What? Having more money WILL allow you to keep the school open on Friday?

That sounds truthy but I doubt it. Teachers and administrators are all college educated. The military in contrast creates tons of non-college degree jobs. And a lot of the spending on defense contractors goes to skilled blue collar factory jobs. (Defense contractors, contrary to popular belief, have pretty small profit margins, and skilled labor is a huge fraction of their costs.)

True, but it's about more than jobs. Imagine the US government was spending $50 billion building 'bridges to nowhere'. Would you support this scheme because it employs thousands of US workers?

Currently the US spends $598 billion per year on the military. To me, the US would be better off spending $548 billion on its military and and extra $50 billion on education. There would be fewer soldiers and more teachers, so in the short term it might not have an effect on total number of jobs. But the 'return on investment' of that extra education spending would be far more valuable than the loss of military power that the US would be giving up.

Cutting the defence budget to boost education might actually mean a stronger military in the longer term if it leads to higher GDP and more engineers to build military robots and drones.

> Currently the US spends $598 billion per year on the military. To me, the US would be better off spending $548 billion on its military and and extra $50 billion on education

We already spend over $600 billion per year on education. What concrete goal would reallocating $50 billion from the military to education achieve? It's also a false dichotomy. If the goal is to really help people, let's cut 10% from both and cut a check for $200/month to every school-aged child.

But spending that $200 billion on primary education doesn't make it disappear in a black hole either.

One could even argue that money spent on DOD budgets trickles down less to the inhabitants of the state that raised the money in taxes in the first place compared to money spent on education.

See it this way: you lose $jobs in the defense industry sector, but create $jobs in the education sector. Which investment will bring a better ROI?

Venn diagram:

$x_jobs lost, $y_jobs gained, $z_jobs overlap. $z_jobs is much much smaller than you may think. What does the machinist at boeing do when their job is cut? Teach torch-welding at the local highschool?

But why are $x_jobs-$z_jobs more deserving of having a state-subsidized job than $y_jobs-$z_jobs?

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