Cutting Pentagon pork could fund free childcare in the US

[unhappycamper]

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/8/cutting-pentagon-pork-could-fund-free-childcare-in-the-us.html

Current childcare costs are bankrupting working parents

Cutting Pentagon pork could fund free childcare in the US
August 31, 2015 2:00AM ET
by C. Robert Gibson

The cost of childcare is bankrupting America’s parents. But providing free, universal childcare for all parents is easily affordable by simply cutting a small handful of military programs whose absence almost nobody would notice.

~snip~

One solution for funding free childcare for all parents could be found by simply cutting out Pentagon waste that nobody would notice.

To find out how much free, universal childcare would cost for all American children under age 5, I calculated the median cost of childcare in all 50 states using data published by The Boston Globe in 2014. The Globe’s research showed the estimated cost of full-time childcare for one child in all 50 states in 2012 dollars. The cheapest was Mississippi ($4,863 per year for an infant), while the most expensive was Washington, D.C. ($21,948 per year for an infant). The median figure was $9,230 — the halfway point between 26th-most expensive (Wyoming, $9,100 per year for an infant) and 25th-most expensive (Maine, $9,360 per year for an infant). By multiplying that figure by the estimated 21,005,852 children in the U.S. under age 5, I estimated the total cost for providing childcare to all of these children to be $193.8 billion.

That sounds like a lot, but much of the funds can be made available by simply eliminating one wasteful Pentagon program that serves no purpose: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

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There is other low hanging fruit at the link.

[jtuck004]

1. Cutting the number of children would free everyone. n/t

[PatrickforO]

2. That is something that would REALLY help the American people, and would help our economy quite a bit