The $2,000,000 Missile vs. Your Neighborhood Library

I was sitting in traffic the other day, standard Monday morning gloom,and a jet screamed overhead. Loud. The kind of loud that makes you check if your windows are still in their frames.

My first thought wasn’t about aerodynamics. It was about my tax return.

I’m Dave, and if you’ve been following Docket One, you know I have a bit of a thing for numbers. Not the “accountant in a windowless basement” kind of thing, but the “what does this actually mean for my life” kind of thing.

Military budgets are the ultimate “dead zone” for human empathy. When someone says, “The defense budget is $850 billion,” your brain just does a hard reboot. It’s too many zeros. It feels like monopoly money.

So, I built something to fix that.

Meet the “Cost of War” Calculator

I decided to strip away the politics and the spreadsheets and just look at the Opportunity Cost. Because every dollar we spend on things designed to explode is a dollar we aren’t spending on things designed to help us live.

Check out the Cost of War Calculator here

Here are a few things I learned while wiring this up that legitimately kept me awake at night:

• The F-35 Lightning II: It’s a marvel of engineering, sure. But one of these stealth fighters costs roughly $82.5 million. For that same price, we could build 15,000 water wells in developing nations. 15,000. That’s not a typo. That’s enough to change the trajectory of entire regions.
• The Tomahawk Cruise Missile: A single tactical strike costs about $2 million. That’s enough to fund two full years of clean water for a small city, or stock an entire Public Library collection.
• The Javelin Anti-Tank: This one costs $200k. In the time it takes to fire one, you could have paid the annual salaries of 4 teachers.

The “Second” That You Bought

One of my favorite (and most depressing) parts of this tool is the Tax Contribution Slider.

I put in my own annual tax bill, about $15,000. The calculator told me that my entire year of hard work and “contributing to society” funds exactly 0.000557 seconds of the global defense engine.

I bought half a millisecond of a Stinger missile. Yay me.

Why This Matters

Look, I’m not here to debate foreign policy. But I do think we deserve to know the price tag. We’re often told there “isn’t enough in the budget” for schools, or clinics, or infrastructure.

But when you see that one Patriot PAC-3 missile ($4 million) could fund the entire annual budget of a public elementary school, the “not enough money” argument starts to feel a little thin.

Numbers are neutral, but they tell a story. Go play with the tool, slide the bars around, and see what your “seconds” are buying.

Stay curious (and maybe a little skeptical),

Dave blogger, Docket One