In the Lab Oppenheimer Built, the U.S. Is Building Nuclear Bomb Cores Again

In the Lab Oppenheimer Built, the U.S. Is Building Nuclear Bomb Cores Again(time.com)

9 points by mjreacher 2 years ago | 2 comments

simonblack 2 years ago |

Much better to spend that money gainfully on bomb cores that will never be used, than wastefully on roads, schools and hospitals.

credit_guy 2 years ago | |

But they are being used. They are not going "boom", but they are being used for deterrence. Ukraine used to have nukes, was duped into giving them up, and now they are in an unenviable position.

As for roads, schools and hospitals. Are you saying the US is not spending on them? I think we are spending more on roads, schools and hospitals than pretty much any other nation.

In NYC, the Department of Education has a current annual budget of $31.5 BN [1]. That's just one city with a population of 8 million people, in a nation with a total population of 330 million.

For comparison, the other DoE, the Department of Energy, has a budget that allocates $27.2 BN to nuclear weapons [2]. That's less than the budget for schools in a single city in the US.

We could give up the nuclear weapons and with the money saved we could almost double the school budget of NYC. Would that help? The NYC school budget is extraordinarily inefficient. The K-12 public schools have 1 million students [3]. So the city pays more than $30k per student. You did not misread that, and I did not make an arithmetic mistake: the city of New York pays (from our taxes) more than $30k per student. That's more than tuition at private schools in all other countries other than the US. All right, I didn't check that, maybe private school tuition is higher in Monaco or a handful of other ministates. But in the UK for example, the average private school tuition is about £15k, which is $20k [4].

What do kids get for $30k in NYC? Not much. For example [5]:

  >The percentage of students in New York City who performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level was 27 percent in 2019.

So, only 27% of the kids in the public schools in NYC are deemed proficient in reading. That's what $31 billion gets you.

[1] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-school-budget-...

[2] https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-energy?fy=2...

[3] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/reports/doe-data-at-a-g...

[4] https://thinkstudent.co.uk/how-much-does-private-school-cost...

[5] https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/publications/d...