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Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

I’m sure this has nothing to do with 3.1 million graduate students versus 500 F-35s.

For actual context, F-35 program receives $9B per year (amortized over lifetime), which is $3000 per year per graduate student. Erasing the F-35 program entirely would make something like a 10% difference in graduate wages, while destroying the US Air Force as a modern military.

So no — your request to fund graduate students is more expensive than the F-35 program and delivers at best marginal results.

When you math through per unit or per capita or per year, we already spend more on education and science than the military — and it’s unclear further science funding to the detriment of the military would improve things.

I understand why you want more money, though.

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Where did you get that the number of federally funded graduate students is 3.1 million?

Note that many will have industry, international or self funded (for MS it is less common to have funding). The 9B figure for maintaining the F35 you just said is very close to the entire annual budget of the NSF. Which is the main funding source of most of non medical research.

Also we are not talking about military budget, just the F35 maintenance program here.

The $9B figure is total amortized to yearly: research, development, production, and maintenance across the near century of lifetime (1990s-2080s).

I took the total number of graduate students, to spread the money across them. We could also look at the same number as, eg, funding an increase from 3.1M to 3.3M or 3.4M graduate students.

I stand by my original claim:

A 10% increase in graduate salary or number of students doesn’t justify dismantling our air force.

$9B/yr is less than half of the Pentagon's more recent estimate of $2T through 2088 for the F-35 program (according to Wikipedia and its sources, which is all I have to go on).

And again, the F-35 is not synonymous with the entire air force.

The F-35 is absolutely synonymous with our entire airforce through 2088.

The F-22 is still a viable Air Superiority Fighter but there's about 100 of them. It cannot hold back a peer air force. The primary point of the F-35 was a cheaper F-22 that we could build 3000 of.

4th gen fighters like the F-18 cannot compete in an air war with a large amount of stealth fighters using modern long range missiles, like China is fielding. They would be defeated before even seeing a blip on their radars.

Without the power of Air Superiority, all the rest of our air force is basically useless. B2s and B21s might still be usable, but they cannot maintain a strategic bombing campaign on their own. The money spent on 4th gen missile trucks is pointless.

Giving up the F-35 is equivalent to total abandonment of our "Best Air Force" doctrine and would require a significant shakeup of how we view the military, and billions poured into other parts of the military to make up for giving up the sky. It also means capitulating to China in advance. Though, if we are willing to do that, we could save like half the military budget every year.

Just have to abandon the entire pacific, Japan, and South Korea, and the Philippines, and Australia, and Vietnam, etc etc etc.

Ok, but the military is being used for bad things not good things in one of the most easily defended countries in the world, a pure waste.

> military is being used for bad things

Seems that sending a bunch of people with guns/bombs/etc to another country is almost always bad.

The military doing good things like ... um ... helping out during natural disasters or genuine peacekeeping is entirely a rare thing.

Defense is a legitimate thing to worry about. For example, Vietnam defended itself against America. We do not defend, we attack and pillage resources from the global south. Real defense is honorable and to be celebrated. However, the US military is not an institution that does those things and they cloak themselves (well until recently) in rhetoric designed to confuse the public.

You are both comparing stuff that is nonsensical to compare $ amounts on. Would you give up science for more F-35s or vice versa? probably not or not by much.

The poster said they work in academia, not the part that has to do with science, so it seems unfair to compare the F35 to all of academia when they were complaining about science being cut.

Later, after the math showing that graduate students as a whole are more expensive than the F35 program, you claim that the U.S already spends more on education and science than the military.

The claim is of course somewhat unclear, because what comprises science spending. Is Darpa science and not military. Does Nasa count as science in this claim? If Nasa does then it might be that you throw all the budgets of NOAA and the EPA and other similar organizations into the Science pile. I say it just because I am unsure how you are calculating one part of your budget. Actually the education part I am going to suggest that is just higher education.

Higher education is around 100 billion a year, without student loans which doubles that.

The U.S government spends also approximately a couple hundred billion for Science, if I am reading this correctly https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf26314 which does a lot of work putting government and business spending together which gives you a number essentially what the government spends on the military.

I can easily construct something that shows the U.S does pay more for science and education than it does for military, but only by being IMHO somewhat misleading, for example by throwing K-12 spending together with the higher education payments and mixing federal and state monies, so to clarify what I mean when I say the U.S in these kinds of conversations and what I think most people mean is "the federal government"

I suppose that the original poster also meant the federal government or it wouldn't make any sense to mention F-35s either.

Under this limitation I believe that the combined ratio of science and higher education is at best 0.8% of GDP and military is 2.8%.

Although it is not really possible to trust very much the data one receives from the American government any more so I am uncertain.

for example this document - I am just having a hard time to trust what data goes into these various parts as federal spending in that area.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

At any rate the military 2.8% I am quoting based on looking around is historically low. I would expect, especially given Iran, that it would be more in line with the historical 4.1%.

pgpf on https://www.pgpf.org/article/the-united-states-spends-more-o...

> I can easily construct something that shows the U.S does pay more for science and education than it does for military, but only by being IMHO somewhat misleading, for example by throwing K-12 spending together with the higher education payments and mixing federal and state monies, so to clarify what I mean when I say the U.S in these kinds of conversations and what I think most people mean is "the federal government"

I disagree: total tax burden and allocation is the relevant aspect, regardless of pointless semantics about which government unit disbursed the funds.

You admit the fact:

US governments spend more on education and science than the military, as measured by total funds allocated to purpose.

I think you’re the one being misleading by quibbling semantics about who dispersed the money: US taxpayers give more of their tax money to science and education than the military.

You focus on the federal government rather than totals is precisely to obscure that fact — which you know to be true, but find inconvenient for your politics. Hence the semantic quibbles.

>You focus on the federal government rather than totals is precisely to obscure that fact — which you know to be true, but find inconvenient for your politics.

thank you for adhering so well to HN guidelines.

other issues - Veterans Administration budget is always not calculated as part of defense spending, because they are separate agencies. So when people say military budget they may be keeping that separate, however putting them together of course increases the amount spent

I happen to believe this document on money more than others, because publication controlled by congress and not the executive.

Atlas of Military Compensation (Biden) https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59475

If we also ask congress for Scientific research funding https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48307 (also under Biden)

about 50% of the 0.6%-0.7% of GDP it reports is to the Department of Defense.

The military industrial complex is getting money from all sorts of things that we describe as separate, but are really part of it.

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