The Cost of One F-15E Lost in Libya Is 563 Wisconsin Teachers
According to the New York Times, the U.S. fighter jet that just crashed in Libya was an F-15E Strike Eagle. The Air Force says each F-15E cost $31.1 million in 1998 dollars (not including fuel, pilot training or anything else). Adjusted for inflation, that's $42.23 million today. Wisconsin teachers are paid an average of $49,816 in salary plus $25,325 in benefits, for a total of $75,141. Therefore, the money spent on the F-15E that just crashed could have paid the salary and benefits of about 563 teachers in Wisconsin for one year. As Dwight Eisehower said in 1953: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people."
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