How This $#*!ty Jet Could Provide 23 Years of Free College for Everyone [View all]

[KamaAina]

Yup, it's the F-35.

http://usuncut.com/politics/how-the-f-35-could-provide-23-years-of-free-college-for-everyone/

$1.45 trillion is a lot of money. That’s the estimated total cost of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which can’t even fire its own gun until 2019 due to software issues. It’s also the estimated cost of providing tuition-free public higher education for every student in the US until 2039. Which one would you choose?

The F-35 is the epitome of Pentagon waste and cronyism. The US has already spent roughly $400 billion on the jet, made by top defense contractor Lockheed Martin. The Pentagon has already promised to buy 2,443 jets for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines in an effort to “modernize” the current fleet of fighter jets....

On the other hand, the estimated cost of tuition-free college for all US students enrolled in public colleges and universities is approximately $62 billion, when accounting for all tuition dollars paid at those schools. That’s actually $7 billion less than the federal government spent on federal aid programs for college students in 2013. If we were to do away with the F-35 program, completely revamp the way our government funds higher education, and start from scratch, we could allocate $62 billion in funding for tuition-free college every year for the next 23 years.

That education would also pay for itself over time, providing additional financial resources as a new crop of highly-skilled graduates enter the workforce. Those graduates would be free from having to make monthly payments on student debt, allowing them to have more disposable income to spend in local economies. And as economists have consistently shown, more money circulating in local economies means more demand for local businesses, which means more jobs created.