Last month, President Obama officially “ended” the war in Afghanistan. This war lasted 13 years, cost us $753.3 billion and killed about 2,200 of our soldiers.
Of course, Obama didn’t actually end the war. He’s keeping 10,800 soldiers there in 2015 and is reducing the number to 5,500 by 2016. That doesn’t seem like the end of a war to me.
Meanwhile, the army is deploying soldiers to Ukraine now.
We have no business going to Ukraine or anywhere else for that matter. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are already expected to cost us between $4 and $6 trillion.
We should have spent that money on things that benefit our own country, like infrastructure or health care or higher education. We need long-term investments like these to keep our economy strong and the American people prosperous.
What if, instead of war, we spend $4 trillion on higher education?
According to the State Higher Education Executive Officers, public universities took in $61.8 billion in 2013, which includes loans and grants. At the same time, student debt is at $1.1 trillion.
If we would have invested the $4 trillion on education instead, we could have forgiven everyone’s student loans. Then we could have used the remaining money to make public college tuition-free for the next 30 to 40 years, depending on inflation and enrollment.
We could have educated millions, possibly billions, of Americans for free.
People wouldn’t be burdened by student loans. College graduates wouldn’t have to move back home after they graduate. They could actually do adult things that stimulate the economy, like buying houses and cars.
We’d have more STEM graduates who could further our advancement in science and technology. Renewable energy would be the norm in our country. Cancer could have possibly been eliminated.
More people would be educated, so we’d move past the arguments over ridiculous things like climate change or same-sex marriage.
We’d have a more educated voting group, so politicians like Sarah Palin and the entire Bush family wouldn’t even be relevant.
But instead, our government chooses to waste trillions of dollars on two wars that killed an estimated 154,000 civilians and 6,802 soldiers. And our government is choosing to prolong this destructive behavior by keeping soldiers overseas.
The worst part is that our lawmakers would rather sacrifice college education for the sake of funding war.
John Boehner criticized Obama for ending the war in Afghanistan. He said it wasn’t the right move and formally ending a war wouldn’t solve any problems. But then he criticized Obama’s free community college proposal by saying that $60 million over 10 years is too much money.
Does he realize how much a war costs compared to community college? Does he realize how much this 13-year war has already cost us?
Two years of free college is a sorry attempt at making education more accessible, and the fact that Obama waited until 2015 to propose this idea is ridiculous. But at least he’s doing something to help our economy. What exactly did the Iraq and Afghanistan wars do for us other than put trillions of dollars in the hole?
I’m tired of lawmakers saying that we can’t afford higher education or universal health care. We shouldn’t be talking about cutting benefits for Social Security and Medicare. We should instead have conversations about expanding these benefits to more people.
Until America takes care of people in its own country, it can’t keep policing the rest of the world.
Cody Sibley is a 19-year-old mass communication freshman from Opelousas, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter @CodySibley.