1 Plane or 25 Schools…Take Your Pick

             When researching for Junior Theme topic ideas today, I came across an article from Forbes that I found to be very interesting. The author, Loren Thompson, details that by 2015, the U.S. Air Force is planning to buy 80-100 new bomber jets to increase our national security and, as the government stated, to “deter nuclear aggression”. I found it peculiar that this would be an act meant to prevent violence, because wouldn’t buying 100 deadly airplanes create alarm in other nations? As shown by the title of his article (“What Planes Cost – And Why $550 Million is Cheap for a New Bomber”), Thompson believes that the government is being very economical in their spending.

However, according to the very same Forbes article, each of these planes is projected to cost about $550 - $700 million, and that does not include the price of testing and developing the planes, nor does it include the price of the support systems that will be needed, like refueling tankers. Not counting the impact that inflation will have on the price, this new fleet of jets will cost around $55 billion. This doesn’t sound all that “cheap” to me.

            While I am aware that our Air Force’s current fleet of jets is about 30 years old and many people think we need more bombers, we could be spending all of this money on something that I believe is far more important – educational systems in America. Perhaps we could reduce military spending in other areas in order to accommodate for this new purchase. In the article, Thompson explains that each one of these $550 million planes is equivalent in “opportunity cost” to about 25 high schools. That means that instead of buying a new fleet of planes for our Air Force, we could provide our nation’s students with 250 new high schools.

            To me at least, there seems to be a problem here. We are, without a doubt, the strongest nation in the world in terms of military power. However, we are not the strongest nation in terms of our educational system. For example, our education system is considered to be “mediocre” according to an internationalranking of OECD countries. So in my opinion, we should be spending this money on making much-needed improvements to our education system, rather than spending it on a new fleet of jets.