We also couldn't fully fund free school meals for this sum, this sum is an ambit claim by the administration not a budget, and a large component of this funding request is for capital expenditures, not ongoing operational expenditure. The (larger) school meal funding dollars would have to be paid regularly.

We're talking about an incremental fragment of the US military budget. It's fair to compare it to an incremental fragment of public wellness that would cost less and have profound impact.

> and a large component of this funding request is for capital expenditures, not ongoing operational expenditure

Oh, of course. You're right. I forgot that drones have zero operational costs and that military spending will decrease next year instead of increasing again and again and again like always.

Also recognize the falsity of attributing the entire defense budget to "the war machine". There are policy debates that could take you lower or (like this request) higher, but it's not like an order-of-magnitude thing.

And we spend well over a trillion dollars on defense. And yet the straight of hormuz is still closed, just like there are still children who don't have enough food and suffer for it. Comparing the total budget of one thing against a budget delta of another thing is wrong. Compare deltas of each and compare their benefits.

That's just not true; the US Military Budget for 2025 was (USD) $768 BB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

https://www.defensebudget.org/en/country/united-states

The VA budget alone is over $400B, and the intelligence budget is _classified_.

or we could continue spending all of our money on wars to get oil, fall further and further behind, and be living like the Flintstons in a few years while all the other countries that actually invested in useful stuff forge forward.

The US is the largest oil producer in the world by a significant margin. They don't have a dependency on foreign oil. They are also the largest refiner of oil products in the world.

Any wars related to oil are about other countries' dependence on foreign oil and refining.

The US is also the second largest oil importer in the world. A true fact about oil is that it's not all the same, so lumping them all into a single category is a mistake when talking about production/refining/consumption.

> They don't have a dependency on foreign oil.

It does still, because local refining is optimized for a global market not domestic self-sufficiency. It would probably require a bit of the old "seizing the means of production" to change that, and the US is generally opposed to such things.

You would lose some of the bottom of the barrel products like asphalt and the high sulphur products sour crudes have as well, but I'm unsure of how impactful that would be in practice.

I'm certainly no petroleum engineer so I'm sure someone will be along to correct me - but I looked into this when I kept seeing this trotted out. You can definitely refine domestic light crude oils in local refineries setup for heavier crudes. The resulting products will simply be more expensive due to the refinery operating less efficiently. Self-sufficiency for fuel products at least is likely not a major concern for the US if the shit hits the fan for real.

The US sells oil refinery services to the rest of the world. They "import" crude oil and then "export" the refined product.

US refinery capacity far exceeds its domestic oil production. What did you think they were doing with all that capacity?

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...

This implies that only they have an interest in starting oil wars, but of course it suits the US to be able to inflict supply shocks on other countries. This is an ancient military strategy which the US has leveraged in the past, eg in the runup to WW2. Under the current administration however, it seems to be imposing them indiscriminately, hurting erstwhile allies as well as opponents.

And it isn’t over oil it’s over Israel being sick of Iran funding groups that continuously launch rockets at their cities. (Which, frankly I get, but maybe not enough to crash the global economy)

Social programs such as Medicare, SSI, etc dwarf the military budget.

Please don't pretend that "school funding" is the same as feeding children or that we don't have established research showing a connection between school meal programs and improved academic performance and reduced student suspensions.

... on the other, your "way of life".

But why, to answer your question? Because those studies show, among other thing, that a non-negligible number of parents, given cash, can't or won't use it to feed their kids.

The SNAP system we have is good, and it's generous. The SNAP benefit for my family of five (two adults, three kids) would be $1,183 a month, which is about what we spend on groceries shopping at ALDI and LIDL. It's good to let parents choose how to use that money to feed their kids, instead of the government imposing a top-down, one-size-fits all system.

Your position isn’t just liberal, it’s post-liberal. You’re saying that it’s not enough to have cash benefits that gives parents reasonable choices in feeding their kids. It’s not about having broad-based policies that work for the typical person in need. It’s a post-liberalism that’s obsessed with changing systems that work for normal people to cater to the most dysfunctional few percent of the population.

I am not concerned with trivia like GPAs or suspensions. Student capability is inherent to their genetics.

The Soviet system created brilliant scientists for a fraction of the US system.

The parental effect only shows up for the immediate parents not grandparents. Hereditary causes would result in persistent effects. The cause is therefore not genetics but rather family environment. (See studies of children of immigrants)

Successful and wealthy parents support their children, giving them a calm and supportive environment in which to excel. (Poor parents who do that have high achieving children even if they themselves didn’t achieve at a high level).

It’s not genetics it’s environment.

One twin raised in rich environment performs similarly to those in poor environments academically.

Anyways in contrast to "Kids are being fed". Almost 14% of children in the U.S. face food insecurity according to the U.S. government. There is real evidence this improved during covid when the government did offer additional funding for school provided meals. The number of food insecure children is on the rise. And every year republican administered states make it harder to obtain and maintain SNAP and WIC benefits whether you qualify or not.

So no it's not an appeal to emotion because there is real data that disagrees with you, and no the kids arent universally being fed. I'm glad you and your family are so secure in your situation you can comfortably argue against children receiving meals on the internet. But for some of us any number of children going hungry for any reason is too many, it's not justifiable as "good enough" or "we spend enough" if there are still hungry children whom have no control of the situation themselves.

What does that term mean? My dad spent his career working in maternal and child health internationally. The way experts define this in the field of child nutrition is based on objective numbers. How many calories are kids eating? What macronutrients are they getting?

Are you saying 14% of kids can’t afford to get the calories and nutrients that nutrition experts say they need? Because if that were true that would be shocking and would certainly justify your position. But I haven’t seen any data to support that.

The government tells you what it means here: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...