An estimated $31 million per day. For six months. $5.642 billion. That’s what the U.S. has spent on its Venezuela aggression. Imagine how much education that could pay for. There are approximately 50 million public school students. Of those, 18 thousand are in New Haven. If New Haven received a fraction of the cost of the war on Venezuela in proportion to its student population, it would be $2 million. Well that helps but won’t close the budget gap. Let’s look at the full military budget for 2026. About $1 trillion. Connecticut’s Congressional delegation voted for it. Trump signed it. Or perhaps we should look at President Trump’s proposal for 2026: $1.5 trillion. Will they vote for that too? How much do we really need for national security? Whose armadas are off our shores? How many enemies that the billionaires created would happily be friends? Perhaps the treasure spent on the military doesn’t actually assure us security at all. Whose security does it actually guarantee? Mainly the profit security of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and a bunch of other weapons manufacturers. A tiny fraction of that keeps their lobbyists in nice houses. It gives their CEOs multiple houses, yachts, private jets. It helps elect friendly members of Congress. The military budget supports a workforce that among other things is not building high speed trains, wind turbines, affordable energy-saving shelters, or teaching our students, caring for our sick and disabled, maintaining our crumbling infrastructure, or greening our economy. Let’s redirect, say, $750 billion to what we need instead of what the Military Industrial Complex extracts from our communities every year. What would that buy? New Haven’s population is 138,000. The U.S. population is 342 million. Based on the proportion of New Haven residents in the country, New Haven would receive $302 million, every year. The whole New Haven budget for 2026 is $705 million. We could add another 43%, and no doubt increase our local and national security at the same time. How much of that we decided to apply to the education budget would be up to us. Bottom line: the money is there. We just have to demand our congressional reps direct it to where it does the most good. Henry Lowendorf belongs to the Greater New Haven Peace Council.   ...read more read less