This is what you'd fund instead of war

A recent study by Yale epidemiologists found that Medicare for All would save approximately 68,000 lives per year while reducing U.S. health care spending by about 13%, or $450 billion annually. While funding Medicare for All and slashing the Pentagon budget is not a 1:1 spending tradeoff, reducing military spending and investing in restructuring our health care system could save taxpayers trillions of dollars in the long run. These savings would not only come through our tax dollars but also through dramatically lower out-of-pocket costs for doctor visits, prescription medications, and other health care expenses.

Slashing the Pentagon budget would also significantly reduce pollution from the world's largest institutional polluter, making both the planet and its people healthier.

Even if universal health care were not the primary goal of reducing the Pentagon budget, here are some health care–related investments that the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget could fund instead:

• 11.22 million registered nurses
• 430.42 million children receiving Medicaid — more than the entire U.S. population, covering every child in the U.S. at least four times over
• 81.88 million military veterans receiving VA medical care
• 175.08 million people receiving Medicaid

The cost of ending homelessness in the U.S. is a drop in the bucket compared with the $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget. Estimates for ending homelessness range from around $11 billion to $30 billion per year. Even if those estimates are a gross underestimate — if it actually cost closer to $100 billion to ensure that everyone in the richest country in the history of the world has a roof over their head — it would still amount to only 6% of the proposed 2027 war budget.

Here are some housing-related investments that could be funded instead with the Pentagon budget:

• 171.33 million public housing units
• 14.08 million living-wage jobs for a single parent with two children

There have been many proposals over the years to make college free. The Pentagon budget could pay for all of them, with free-college plans estimated to cost between $27.8 billion and $75 billion in their first year of implementation. Over the course of a decade, the economic benefits of free college would vastly outweigh the cost.

The main obstacle to plans like these is our deeply misaligned priorities. Spending $1.5 trillion on war diverts funds that could otherwise be invested in things like education. In addition, poverty is the military's most effective recruitment tool. A major incentive for joining the military is the promise of economic stability and access to educational benefits, including free college. Making those opportunities available to everyone would undermine one of the U.S. military's primary recruitment advantages.

• 36.66 million scholarships for university students for four years
• 40.14 million borrowers receiving federal student loan forgiveness for one year

Cutting the Pentagon budget could also affect life before college. Here are some other things that money could fund:

• 87.28 million Head Start slots for children for one year
• 15.95 million elementary school teachers for one year

There are 43 million people in the U.S. living with student loans. Access to education is a huge recruitment tool of the U.S. military, and without it the ruling class and tech oligarchs would have a hard time recruiting people to fight their wars for resources. Student debt traps our younger generations in a permanent, often lifelong state of financial precarity, with their debt constantly looming over their heads. Why should that be the case in the richest country in the world? Getting an education shouldn't put anyone tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt while a handful of people get richer off our labor and taxpayer dollars (oftentimes funneled to the ruling class directly through Pentagon contracts).

• 40.14 million borrowers receiving federal student loan forgiveness

$1.5 trillion could do a lot for public transportation in the United States. We could not only work to subsidize Amtrak, and local train and bus systems, but also invest to greatly improve our transit infrastructure. For example, the highest estimate for making buses free in NYC is $1.3 billion, a small drop in the bucket for the Pentagon.

According to Senator Ed Markey's bill to Slash the Pentagon budget, we could also fund a high speed rail across the United States if we divested from war spending! Not only that, we could also expand existing passenger rail service, and electrify the most heavily polluting rail yards and corridors for $205 billion! That's only 13.7% of the Pentagon budget.

China, Japan, Spain, Germany, and France all have high speed rails, but they're not spending even proportionally as much on their military. In a lot of these countries, public transit is heavily subsidized for riders, so affording to get on the train is never a roadblock. If the $1.5 trillion war budget comes to fruition, the U.S. military budget would triple the military budgets of all those countries combined.

A small fraction of the war budget could cover the cost of solar electricity for every household in the U.S. Solar energy is just one small piece of the pie when it comes to addressing climate change, though.

Cutting the Pentagon alone, without even reinvesting the money into other things, would radically decrease world carbon emissions. The Pentagon is the largest institutional polluter in the entire world, if the U.S. military industrial complex was a country, it would rank in the top 25 polluters. Stopping the U.S. war machine would also effectively halt multiple ecocides that are currently ongoing, and ones that would surely happen in the future if the United States continues dropping bombs and waging wars wherever its raging war budget allows it to.

A reduction in Pentagon spending could also push us toward more diplomacy with China, and more diplomacy means more strategic partnerships. The U.S. and China working together to create green technology and reduce carbon emissions is essential to the future of our planet.

If the money were reinvested into high-speed rail, greening our electric grid, and renewable energy, we might actually make great strides toward a livable planet for us and future generations.

Let's take the money spent on just two months of the war in Iran. That money could have funded:

• Pre-K for every four-year-old in America
• Green retrofits for nearly 2,000 public schools
• More than double the cost of restoring the cuts to food benefits (SNAP) in Trump's Big Beautiful Bill

Imagine the climate leaps we could make with $1.5 trillion!