In honor of Pres­i­dents Day, I started doing my income taxes. And by “doing,” I mean open­ing envelopes and shuf­fling the papers around.

Instead of fig­ur­ing out my IRS forms, I con­sulted a few sources to get a rough idea of what my 2006 fed­eral tax money paid for. The exact amounts vary based on the method used to com­pute what frac­tion of inter­est paid on the national debt stems from past mil­i­tary spend­ing, but these fig­ures are pretty telling. I per­son­ally spent:

• $5000-6000 on the military
• $350 on education

I can’t begin to pro­pose a solu­tion to this dis­par­ity, as it is com­pli­cated beyond mea­sure. But at least these num­bers remind me of one of those great moments in pres­i­den­tial ora­tion. The full speech is very stir­ring, and you should read it—but I will include here, in honor of Pres­i­dents Day, just an excerpt from Pres­i­dent Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech to the Amer­i­can Soci­ety for News­pa­per Edi­tors, April 16, 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. . . Under the cloud of threat­en­ing war, it is human­ity hang­ing from a cross of iron.