Earlier today, Rue illustrated the horror of the Army’s $900,000,000 ‘accounting error’ by calculating what that much money could have bought in terms of various weapons systems, and by comparing it to the total defense expenditures of other whole countries.
I posted a link to Rue’s piece on Facebook, and my friend Kristin commented, “Kind of puts that whole “cut PBS funding because every little bit counts” red herring into perspective.” Which got me thinking: just for funsies, what if we take that number outside the completely-overblown-and-disproportionate-to-all-other-facets-of-reality context of the Defense budget? How much would $900,000,000 get us in other parts of our own federal budget? I took a peek through various other Departments’ budgets to see, sampling from a wide range of programs. (Estimates are based on the White House’s FY13 budget).
I’m totally not an accountant, so some of my calculations might be off, but from what I could figure here is a sampling of what other departments/agencies could fund with the amount of money Defense essentially loses in its couch cushions:
| Agency/Program | How Far $900,000,000 Would Go There |
| Head Start | 6 weeks |
| NASA Exploration | 3 months |
| Secret Service | 6 months |
| USAID Operations | 7 months |
| Fish & Wildlife Service | 8 months |
| ATF | 9 months |
| Federal Marshal Service | 9 months |
| Dept. of Education Race to the Top Program | 11 months |
| Federal Work Study Program | 11 months |
| Small Business Administration | 1 year |
| Millennium Challenge Corporation | 1 year |
| Dept. of State Non-proliferation, Anti-terrorist, Demining Programs | 17 months |
| Smithsonian Institution | 17 months |
| VA Prosthetic Research | 18 months |
| Bureau of Labor Statistics | 18 months |
| OSHA | 19 months |
| NASA Aeronautics | 20 months |
| Dept. of Housing and Urban Development Housing for the Elderly | 2 years |
| Peace Corps | 29 months |
| Dept. of Justice Juvenile Justice & Child Safety Programs | 3 years |
| Dept. of Labor Veterans Employment & Training Program | 3.5 years |
| Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS) | 4 years |
| Dept. of Commerce Economic Development Administration | 4 years |
| National Endowment for the Arts | 6 years |
| National Endowment for the Humanities | 6 years |
| Dept. of Housing and Urban Development Housing for People with Disabilities | 6 years |
| Dept. of Labor Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs | 7 years |
| National Galleries of Art | 7.5 years |
| Dept. of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights | 23 years |
Nah, but unusable Stryker parts are cool, too.
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The fact that we spend too much on defense should not excuse the fact that we also spend too much on everything else. It would be interesting to imagine what tax payers might do with their money were it not taken to pay for either unnecessary Stryker parts or many of these other things. One gets angry because a thief has stolen from them, not because the thief has spent their stolen money poorly.
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