sortition (selection by lot) and the concept of the idiotes (private citizen) were directly linked to the Athenian democratic ideal that governance was a duty shared by all citizens, not just an elite few. Sortition ensured a representative government of ordinary people, while the idiotes was viewed negatively as someone who shirked this civic responsibility. YouTube +4
Sortition in Ancient Greece
Sortition was considered the truly democratic method of selecting public officials, as opposed to elections, which were viewed as aristocratic because they favored the wealthy, well-known, orators, and skilled. YouTube +1
The Kleroterion: Athenians used a specialized stone machine called a kleroterion to randomly select citizens for government positions, ensuring fairness and preventing corruption.
The Council of 500 (Boule): The primary administrative body, which prepared legislation for the Assembly, was composed of citizens chosen by lot annually.
Magistrates and Courts: Roughly 600 of the 700 city magistrates were chosen by lot, as were the 6,000 jurors (dikastai) who served in the courts.
Exceptions: Positions requiring specific skills, such as military generals (strategoi), were elected rather than chosen by lot.
Rotation: Sortition was paired with limited terms, ensuring high turnover and allowing as many citizens as possible to take their turn administering the state. YouTube +4
Idiotes in Ancient Greece
The term idiotes (ἰδιώτης) originated from idios (“private” or “one’s own”). It did not originally mean a mentally deficient person, but rather a “private individual” who did not participate in public affairs (ta politika). newDemocracy Foundation +4
Political Obligation: In Athenian democracy, civic engagement was a duty. A citizen was expected to participate in the Assembly (Ekklesia), serve on juries, and potentially hold office.
Social Stigma: Those who abstained from politics were considered self-centered, foolish, and potentially dangerous to the state. They were viewed as “amateurs” or “unskilled” in the art of governance compared to active citizens.
Evolution of Meaning: Over time, particularly in the Roman era, the term evolved to mean uneducated or ignorant, eventually transforming into the modern, derogatory term “idiot”. Facebook +5
Summary: The Connection
Sortition was designed to force the idiotes out of their private lives and into public service, ensuring that the government was comprised of ordinary citizens rather than professional politicians. It represented the Greek belief that in matters of politics, the average citizen was competent to rule and be ruled in turn. Marxists Internet Archive +4
The Sacred Art of Attachment: A Manifesto for Beautiful Desires
I’m totally attached to giving all my heart and soul to the noble desires I’m moved by. I adore these desires. I want to fulfill them because they will make the world a better place and make me a more soulful source of beauty and truth and love.
This isn’t a confession or an admission of spiritual delinquency. It’s a declaration of my sacred path.
In my world, being attached to my magnificent desires is a glorious and honorable strategy for living a meaningful life. Being deeply invested in my constructive and compassionate yearnings enhances me in every imaginable way.
While some spiritual paths preach the renunciation of desire as the path to freedom, I live according to a different truth: that devotional attachment to my righteous desires is a form of sovereign emancipation. It’s a gateway to becoming more fully alive and more vividly engaged with the sublime project of being creatively incarnate as a human being on this messy and gorgeous planet.
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Desires That Liberate
The theory that we should detach ourselves from desire makes sense in certain contexts. If we’re attached to things we can’t control, we will suffer. If we’re attached to permanence in an impermanent world, we will be disappointed. If we’re grasping at trivial forms of pleasure and desperately fleeing from difficulties, we will exhaust ourselves. I understand why these teachings arose and why they have helped many people.
But what’s too rarely acknowledged in contemporary spiritual discourse is that attachment can also be a path of liberation: when we’re attached to the right things in the right ways.
I’ll be precise: There’s a big difference between attachment rooted in fear of emptiness and attachment rooted in love of possibility. Addiction is attachment that panics. It clutches because it can’t tolerate absence and collapses when it doesn’t get what it wants.
Devotion, by contrast, is attachment that loves. It commits because it recognizes beauty and wants to collaborate with its unfolding. When disappointed, it doesn’t shrink; it deepens.
Addiction says, “Without this, I am nothing.” Devoted attachment says, “Because this matters, I will grow.” One contracts the soul around scarcity. The other expands it toward possibility—even through setback or loss.
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And this is exactly why discernment matters. Not all desires are created equal! I don’t believe we should cling to and pursue every passing whim, petty wish, and destructive craving.
But I urge us to celebrate and embrace beautiful desires: the longings that, when pursued with zeal and devout intention, render us more magnificent and inspire us to make the world more luminous.
The spiritual teachers who advocate detachment seem to conflate all desire, as if the craving for another toke of crystal meth and the longing for social justice were the same thing. But they’re not, of course. One diminishes us; the other enhances us. One creates suffering; the other creates meaning.
The problem isn’t desire itself but unconscious desires, destructive desires, and distorted desires that serve our smaller understandings rather than our larger purpose.
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To further understand why I make this distinction, I’ll widen the frame and ask a more radical question: What if desire isn’t an annoying and inconvenient flaw in the human psyche, but a structural principle of the cosmos?
My view: Desire isn’t a private quirk of our personal psychology. It’s evolutionary intelligence moving through everyone and everything everywhere. Evolution itself is desire unfolding: matter yearning toward complexity and consciousness pressing toward greater self-awareness.
Stars burn because gravity longs for form. The seed splits because it desires to engage with the sun. From hydrogen to hummingbird, from single cell to symphony, the cosmos advances by yearning.
In that glorious context, my rapt attachment to beautiful outcomes isn’t quirky rebellion against some particular spiritual law; it’s my buoyant participation in the engine of creation. When I devote myself to justice, beauty, healing, and love, I’m not indulging in egoic craving. I’m aligning my entire life energy with the primal thrust of existence toward richer expression. I am the universe universing itself.
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Beautiful Desires
Here are a few of the desires I love, cultivate, and am gleefully attached to:
• A desire for beguiling riddles and enchanting challenges that excite my mind and heart.
• A desire to attract ongoing encounters with evocative, nonstandard beauty so as to always ensure a part of me remains untamed.
• A desire to keep refining and expanding my ability to learn from non-human intelligences as well as from humans: from animals, plants, and ecosystems, from the weather and the seasons, from spirits and dreams and synchronicities. The universe is crammed with teachers if I’m an eagerly curious student.
• A desire to help create a world in which everyone gets the food, housing, and health care they need. This isn’t abstract compassion. It’s a burning, churning, yearning attachment to collective abundance that motivates concrete action. I can’t and won’t rest in spiritual comfort while others suffer material deprivation.
• A desire for allies who enjoy my distinctive idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. Not people who tolerate my quirks despite them, but those who are nourished by them, who recognize in my peculiarities a splash of soulfulness that feeds their own wild authenticity.
• A desire to keep outgrowing what worked for me in the past and a desire to ceaselessly explore renewed approaches to expressing my soul’s code.
• A desire to foster and protect the health and beauty of the natural world.
• A desire for revelations and experiences that steer me away from thinking and acting like the machines I interact with so much.
• A desire to keep recreating and reinvigorating my relationships with those I love.
• A desire to replace cynical clichés with homemade spells of astonishment, composted from absurdity, reverence, and exuberant rebellion.
· A desire to regularly refresh my quest for freedom and deepen my capacity to be free.
• A desire to minimize the world’s bigotry, misogyny, oligarchy, racism, xenophobia, and militarism.
• And many more desires, too, like the desire to keep finding new desires that re-inspire my love for the world.
The Paradox of Detachment
One of the dominant narratives of alternate spirituality in America speculates that desire is the root of suffering and that liberation comes through detachment. Where do these theories come from?
They have roots in traditions of immense depth and beauty. I’m not declaring they’re wrong or bad. I’m saying they’re not my path—and perhaps not the path of other souls who are temperamentally built for fervent incarnation rather than renunciation.
Regarding the concept of non-attachment, ancient Buddhist texts in Pali mention nekkhamma, a word translated as “renunciation.” This term also conveys the meaning of “giving up the world and leading a holy life” or “freedom from lust, craving, and desires.” Here’s the central hypothesis: The path to emancipation and wisdom requires the renunciation of worldly engagement.
But my personal approach is not to lead a holy life by giving up the world. Just the opposite: To live a holy life, I give myself gladly and fervently to the world. “Renunciation” isn’t interesting or valuable to me. I don’t believe the spiritual quest requires withdrawal from the world’s complexities. My noblest vigor emerges from my passionate engagement with what life brings me. I aspire to be empathically interwoven with both its beauty and its brokenness.
Consider the Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism’s most influential texts. A key passage says, “You have a right to perform your actions, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.”
This verse suggests that the anticipated results of our actions shouldn’t be the motivation for our performance of those actions. We should act without concern for outcomes; we should serve without expecting rewards.
I’m allergic to that principle. To cultivate optimal health and wisdom, I seek total immersion in possibilities i find exciting. I love loveLOVE to be motivated by the hope of achieving my desires.
When I work to create something helpful or inspiring, I’m attached to it being thoroughly and wonderfully fulfilled. When I work in behalf of LGBTQ+ rights or immigrant protection, I am very attached to the possibility that my work will yield potent results. When I write a new song, I am deeply attached to it being lyrical and soulful.
Visions of the desired outcomes pump up my energy and focus, feeding my stamina and honing my determination to persist through obstacles.
The Hindu philosopher Madhvacharya advocated godliness through right actions: “One who is spiritually situated performs actions unattached to reward. Actions performed without desire as a matter of duty are full of wisdom.” By his measure, I am not “spiritually situated.” He wouldn’t approve of the fact that I perform actions with a spirited desire for their successful outcomes, invigorated by pleasure and joy rather than duty.
So yes, Madhvacharya would judge me harshly. But I’m OK with that. I’d much rather be vigorously engrossed in the challenges of living well on the earth than be emotionally indifferent to whether my work succeeds or fails.
Hindu philosopher Adi Shankaracharya went even further, teaching that hankering for the fruits of labor leads to entrapment in the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—the ultimate quagmire!—thus inhibiting one’s liberation. According to this view, my attachment to outcomes keeps me trapped in terminal unease and unsatisfactoriness—and prevents me from ever reaching the highest spiritual goal.
But I’m not interested in such an accomplishment. I don’t hanker to permanently escape the Great and Mysterious Game of birth, death, and rebirth. I love it here! If liberation means ceasing to care whether beauty flourishes or justice prevails, then I choose what Shankaracharya would call entrapment. Here, in this world, in this body, working toward transformations and creations I care about deeply: That’s where I want to be.
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I should note that both Buddhism and Hinduism are vast and internally diverse, containing some traditions where passionate attachment and worldly engagement are honored. Tantra, bhakti devotion, and engaged Buddhism are examples. Some Vajrayana practitioners are deeply committed to making our earth into more of a paradise.
My aversion isn’t to these traditions, but to the particular strains of Americanized, renunciation-centered teachings that have come to dominate so much of alternative spirituality.
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Attachment as Fuel for Transformation
Here’s a very practical fact: I’m deeply invested in making my gorgeous, righteous desires come true because doing so fuels my motivation to attract the learning experiences, resources, and willpower I need to fulfill them. My attachment strengthens my resolve and boosts my ability to discipline myself as I pursue my high-minded and wild-hearted purposes.
When I was sick with a death-threatening illness, I was VERY attached to staying alive. That attitude was crucial in rousing the ingenuity and resilience necessary to do all the things necessary to stay alive: the difficult and excruciating treatments, the acute attention to every detail of my rigorous health regimen, and the emotional challenge of maintaining hope.
If I had been detached from the outcome, if I had adopted an attitude of “whatever happens is fine,” I’m very sure I could not have marshaled the ferocious will to live that my healing required.
In my world, attachment is another word for devotion. It’s not the grasping of addiction or the desperation of fear, but the focused zeal of knowing what I love and being joyfully driven to work for its flourishing. My attachment is my ardor, dedication, constancy, enthusiasm, resolve, zest, and tenacity. It’s my unfailing guide.
The Shadow of This Path
To be fiercely attached to beautiful desires is to risk heartbreak. Not every righteous longing blossoms and not every song finds its audience. I don’t pretend otherwise. My devotion doesn’t guarantee triumph. When I attach myself to luminous outcomes, I make myself vulnerable to grief, frustration, and humbling defeat.
But here’s a crucial distinction: I’m attached to participation, not invulnerability. If my desires are thwarted, I grieve, learn, and adapt. I let the failure compost me. My attachment doesn’t demand that the world obey me; it demands that I remain in living relationship with the world.
Addiction collapses when it doesn’t get what it wants, but devotion evolves. If a cherished outcome dissolves, I stay engaged with the larger arc of becoming, even if this particular chapter ends in partial success or even failure.
There’s another shadowy danger i must be aware of, too. Passion can harden into self-righteousness. Outcome-focus can curdle into control. My attachment could, if left unchecked, become tyranny disguised as virtue.
That’s why I rely on humor, allies, dreamwork, and regular encounters with forces larger than my will. The weather, the ocean, illness, love, and time all remind me that I’m not the sovereign of reality. I’m a collaborator. My desires are sacred, but they’re not supreme. They’ve got to stay in conversation with the Great Mystery.
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The Path of Fervent Incarnation
One of the ultimate risks of my path is that I will feel everything. Another is that I will be pierced when beauty falters and gutted when justice fails. A third is that my devotion may sometimes overheat into self-righteousness or exhaust me with its ferocity.
But I would rather be broken open by caring than preserved by detachment. I would rather risk scorching myself in the fires of magnificent desires than cultivate a sterile coolness that never catches flame.
If loving this world so fiercely binds me to its cycles of birth and death again and again, then so be it. I am not seeking escape from the Great and Mysterious Game. I want ever-deeper participation in its dangerous, dazzling intimacy.
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PS: What I’m declaring in this manifesto is not simply: “I defend desire.” I’m declaring, “I trust incarnation.”
“When we get to the Self beyond its physical and mental manifestations, we realize we are not fragile mortal beings. There is an unbroken link between ourselves and the Divine Consciousness flowing through and permeating everything.”
Daya Mata (1914-2010) American Spiritual Teacher
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
“The person that you feel yourself to be, according to the Sufis, is a false person, which has no true reality.”
~ Idries Shah
–Idries Shah (June 16, 1924 – November 23, 1996) was an author and teacher in the Sufi tradition who wrote over three dozen books on topics ranging … Wikipedia
In Greek myth, the Sphinx was a creature (woman’s head, lion’s body) who “strangled” or killed those who couldn’t answer her riddle. The Greek word Sphíngx is thought to come from the Greek verb sphíngō (σφίγγω), meaning “to bind tight” or “to squeeze.”
Sphincter
The word sphincter comes from the Greek sphinktēr, meaning “a band or muscle that binds tight.” In anatomy, a sphincter is a circular muscle that constricts or closes an opening (like the anal or pyloric sphincter).
The Connection
Both words come from the same Greek root: sphíngō = to squeeze, bind, or tighten.
The Sphinx: associated with “strangling” or tightening.
The sphincter: literally a “tightening” muscle.
So the link is etymological — they share the same root meaning “to squeeze.”
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Mar 3, 2026 Julia Mossbridge, PhD, is a cognitive neuroscientist focused on understanding and training exceptional human performance including psi effects such as precognition, technological intuition, human-AI teaming, time, and accessing unconditional love. She is the co-founder and Board Chair of TILT: The Institute for Love and Time, Senior Distinguished Fellow in Human Potential at the Center for the Future of AI, Mind, and Society at Florida Atlantic University, Affiliate Professor in the Department of Biophysics and Physics at University of San Diego, Senior Data+Intuition Consultant at Tangible IQ, a member of the Alfred Lee Loomis Innovation Council at the Stimson Center, and the founder of Mossbridge Institute. Julia is author and coauthor of numerous books and scientific articles, including Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness with Imants Baruss; The Calling: A 12-Week Science-Based Program to Discover, Energize, and Engage Your Soul’s Work; The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life Paperback; and Have a Nice Disclosure. Her website is juliamossbridge.com Julia describes her research that explores the relationship between photons and time, “Replication and Characterization of the Causally Ambiguous Duration-Sorting (CADS) Effect”, that builds on the double-slit experiment. Through her exploration of bosonic particles, consciousness, and the past, present, and future, she suggests that the nature of time may be more like a braid than linear. By equating the informational substrate of the universe, that connects everything, with unconditional love, she demonstrates a connection of science and spirituality. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:42 Causally ambiguous research 00:05:08 The double-slit experiment and interference pattern 00:13:08 Collapsing the wave function 00:15:50 Presentiment or retrocausality 00:20:31 Time and space 00:29:36 Consciousness and universal love 00:34:50 The physics of love 00:50:05 Photons and mind-like particles 00:54:04 The past and future are in the present. 00:57:45 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed CoHost, Emmy Vadnais, OTR/L, is a licensed occupational therapist, intuitive healer and coach, and spiritual guide based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Emmy is the founder of the Intuitive Connections and Holistic OT communities. She is the author of Intuitive Development: How to Trust Your Inner Knowing for Guidance With Relationships, Health, and Spirituality. Her website is https://emmyvadnais.com (Recorded on January 23, 2026)
Vampire lore informs us that holding up a mirror to someone possessed by the vampire archetype is a dangerous task and should not be attempted lightly. Not casting a reflection in the mirror, people playing out the role of psychic vampires are not able to reflect upon themselves. Interestingly, philosopher Hannah Arendt points out that an inability to self-reflectively think about ourselves is one of the primary characteristics of evil.
In the alchemical treatise Corpus Hermeticum, the soul is admonished to save itself from agnosia (unconsciousness). The text says, “But first you must tear off this garment which you wear,–this cloak of darkness, this web of unconsciousness, this [prop] of evil, this bond of corruption, this living death, this visible corpse, this tomb you carry about with you, this inner robber.”
“We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening.” (John Wheeler, At Home in the Universe)
It reminds me of the poet Milton’s words describing Satan, “This is a false Body, an Incrustation over my Immortal Spirit, a Selfhood which must be put off and annihilated alway.” Instead of being “put on,” this “false body” needs to be seen through and “put off.” Blake refers to the false body of Satan as an “empire of nothing,” and says he is “Satan this body of Doubt that seems but Is Not.” If I don’t see through this false body, this “body of Doubt that seems but Is Not,” I am then in danger of identifying with it, in which case I would be complicit in being replaced by a pale imitation, false duplicate and toxic mimic of myself.
St. John writes, “The divine touches the soul to renew it and to ripen it, in order to make it divine, to detach it from the habitual affections and qualities of the old man, to which it clings and conforms itself.”
It brings to mind the Mark Twain quote that Jung cites in his seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “The greatest force on earth is mass stupidity.” Jung comments, “Stupidity is the extraordinary power and Mark Twain saw it.” It makes me think of Jung’s description of “normal” people as “ridiculously unconscious,” elsewhere he refers to the “barbarous unconsciousness” of humanity.
It makes me think of a quote from the scientist Carl Sagan, “If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The Bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken…it’s sometimes earlier to reject strong evident than to admit that we’ve been wrong.”
The “persona”, according to Jung, “is that which in reality one is not,” which is to say it is not who one is but the mask one presents to the world; it is who one “seems” to be. The word “persona” is taken by Jung from the Latin word for “actor’s mask.” Talking about the disincentive to step out of identifying with our persona, Jung writes that “the temptation to be what one seems to be is great, because the person is usually rewarded in cash.” In order words, our culture provides benefits for people to identify with who they appear to be, rather than who they truly are.
It makes me think of Nietzsche’s words, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”
In one of my favorite quotes, June writes, “Without wishing it, we human beings are placed in situation sin which the great ‘principles’ entangle us in something, and God leaves it to us to find a way out…Here a man can do nothing but stand his ground.”
To quote visionary Buckminster Fuller, if we are not full of imagination, we are “not very sane.” The world of the creative imagination is as ontologically real as the world of the senses, and its contents have a living reality all their own.”
It is the alchemists’ version of true imagination that Einstein was referring to when he famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
This reminds me of the Kabbalah’s insight that a “sinner” who “repents” (which etymologically, has to do with a “re-turning”) is on a higher level than the saint who has never sinned.
One of the inner meanings of “Satan” is “that which obstructs.” The heroic, creative life is always threatened, as if the obstructing forces are tests, guardians of the threshold of evolution. This archetypal dynamic has been symbolically represented from time immemorial in numerous myths and fairy tales. And yet, these obscuring and oppositional forces help us to build up the muscle of realization, which is to say that from the cosmic perspective, though apparently obstructing our true nature, these forker forces ultimately serve its realization.
–Paul Levy, Awakened by Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father
Cut the military budget in half. Bloated war spending remains a sacred cow for far too many
Eric Blanc Mar 2, 2026 (laborpolitics@substack.com)
Donald Trump is setting Iran and the world on fire. And there’s every reason to think he’ll keep escalating abroad as his regime gets weaker and less popular at home.
But we should be honest: this didn’t start with Trump. For decades, both parties have shared the same basic commitment to U.S. military dominance over the world. Fifty-five percent of House Democrats voted in favor of the most recent US armed forces budget.
Establishment liberals like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries prefer a more stable and less erratic version of empire. That’s why their objections about the Iran attack are about process and “strategic clarity,” not a break with the underlying goal of U.S. supremacy. For her part, Kamala Harris on the campaign trail promised to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
What almost never gets seriously questioned in mainstream US politics is the premise itself: that Washington has the right to bomb, invade, or attack any country across the globe whenever it decides it has a sufficiently good reason. There are important exceptions — Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, James Talarico, and others have taken clearer antiwar stances.
But it’s not enough just to oppose this war on Iran. Nor is it enough to demand an end to US aid to Israel. As long as the United States spends almost $1 trillion a year on the military, there will be overwhelming institutional and political pressure to use that machine, justify that machine, and keep expanding that machine — while insisting that there’s no money at home to make life affordable for working people.
Anti-MAGA forces need to stop treating military-budget cuts like a fringe talking point. In the midterms and in 2028, we should agitate for serious reforms to the US war machine. What’s a reasonable-but-ambitious starting point? Cut the armed forces’ $886 billion budget in half.
That’s not pie in the sky. A military budget of “only” about $443 billion would still leave the United States the biggest military spender in the world. But it could mark a real step away from the strategy and practice of imperialism.
Humanity needs international cooperation, not conflict. The United States’s deepening rivalry with China threatens to push the globe into another catastrophic great-power spiral at precisely the moment we need to confront actual existential questions like climate breakdown and how to develop AI slowly and carefully enough that it doesn’t wreck our livelihoods or human civilization.
And with so many working-class Americans barely hanging on, freeing up roughly $500 billion every year would go a long way toward making life in this country livable again.
We are constantly told that universal childcare is too expensive, housing is too expensive, healthcare is too expensive, public transit is too expensive, climate adaptation is too expensive. One simple solution is to cut the military budget in half.
Image by Golden Cosmos
Better Ways To Spend Half a Trillion Dollars
So many life-changing policies would become possible if America halved its military budget. Here’s what $443 billion yearly could fund if directed fully toward each item:
1. Medicare for All — Most estimates put the net new federal cost at $300-400 billion/year (replacing premiums, copays, and deductibles currently paid privately). $443 billion/year would essentially fund the transition to a single-payer system, covering every person in the country while eliminating out-of-pocket costs.
2. End hunger — Making breakfast and lunch free at every school costs about $20 billion per year. Expanding SNAP and WIC to fully eliminate food insecurity would run another $50-100 billion. $443 billion could end hunger in America and completely transform the school nutrition system with money to spare many times over.
3. Build millions of public housing units — Average cost to build a quality affordable unit is roughly $200,000-$300,000. At $443 billion/year, you could build 1.5 to 2 million new public housing units every single year. The entire estimated national shortage is about 4-7 million units, so you’d close the gap in three to four years and then have an ongoing budget for maintenance, renovation, and continued construction.
4. Cancel all medical debt — Total medical debt in active collection is estimated around $195 billion. You could eliminate every dollar of it in the first year and still have over $240 billion left for other health investments that same year.
5. Cancel all student debt — Total outstanding student debt is roughly $1.8 trillion. You could wipe it all out in about four years, then fund free public college permanently going forward with money to spare.
6. Make public college and trade school free — Total tuition revenue at all public colleges and universities is around $80-90 billion per year. $443 billion covers that almost five times over. You could eliminate tuition, massively expand capacity, and fund living stipends for students.
7. Universal childcare and pre-K — Estimated cost for a universal, high-quality system is roughly $70-100 billion per year. $443 billion would fund a system where every family in America has access to free or near-free childcare from birth through age five, with well-paid unionized staff, and still leave $340+ billion on the table.
8. Green energy transition jobs program — The entire Inflation Reduction Act was about $370 billion in climate spending spread over a decade. $443 billion per year would be roughly twelve times that annual rate. You could retrofit every building in the country, build out renewable energy infrastructure nationwide, and fund union-wage jobs for every displaced fossil fuel worker many times over.
9. National high-speed rail network — California’s single high-speed rail project is estimated around $100 billion. $443 billion/year could build a comprehensive national network connecting every major metro area within a decade, something comparable to what China and Europe have built.
10. Repair all deteriorating infrastructure — The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates the US infrastructure gap, the gap between the amount of money needed for basic infrastructure maintenance versus how much is actually allocated for it, at roughly $2.6 trillion over ten years. $443 billion yearly covers that completely — every bridge, road, dam, water system, school building, and electrical grid — and leaves room for new construction.
11. Universal home and community-based care — There are roughly 800,000 people on Medicaid waiting lists for home care for elderly and disabled people. A comprehensive universal program would cost an estimated $150-200 billion per year. $443 billion fully funds this with well-paid caregivers and eliminates every waitlist in the country.
12. Federal jobs guarantee — Most estimates for a program guaranteeing a $15 per hour job with benefits to anyone who wants one range from $300-500 billion/year depending on uptake. $443 billion lands right in that range, potentially employing 10-15 million people in public works, caregiving, environmental restoration, and community development.
13. Expand and strengthen Social Security — Eliminating the taxable earnings cap is the usual funding mechanism, but $443 billion/year could increase average benefits by roughly 35-40%, lower the retirement age, and extend the trust fund indefinitely. That would lift virtually every senior out of poverty.
14. Community health centers and mental health services — There are currently about 1,400 federally qualified health centers. Estimates suggest we need roughly 8,000-10,000 more to provide universal primary and mental health access. At roughly $5-10 million per center for construction and staffing, $443 billion could build out the entire system in a single year and fund operations for decades.
15. Weatherize and retrofit every home — Average cost to fully weatherize a home is roughly $5,000-$10,000. There are about 35-40 million homes that need it. Total cost: $200-400 billion. $443 billion/year does the entire country in one year, cutting energy bills for tens of millions of families immediately — and reducing carbon emissions.
16. Universal paid family and medical leave — A comprehensive 12-week paid leave program is estimated at roughly $50-75 billion/year. $443 billion funds this nearly six times over. You could offer six months of paid leave and still have hundreds of billions remaining.
17. Fully fund and transform veterans’ care — Veterans Affairs’ (VA) current budget is around $400 billion but is plagued by staffing shortages, long wait times, and crumbling infrastructure, with Congress consistently failing to fund it adequately. $443 billion a year could double VA healthcare staffing, eliminate every wait list, build state-of-the-art facilities in every region, fully fund mental health and suicide prevention programs, end veteran homelessness (roughly 35,000 veterans are unhoused on any given night), and guarantee every veteran world-class care without bureaucratic delays — all while keeping the existing VA public healthcare system rather than privatizing it.
The staggering thing about this list is that even the most expensive items rarely exceed $443 billion individually. You could fund several of them simultaneously with half the military budget. For context, the US spends more on its armed forces than the next nine countries combined.
Peace Is Possible
Even though more Americans want to cut the military budget than expand it — and even though this war on Iran is widely opposed — the military itself as an institution remains remarkably popular. Cutting the military budget in half is ambitious and would be controversial, since so many communities across the US economically rely on supplying goods and services to the military. Why not start with a smaller proposed cut? This is a reasonable question.
My response is, first, that $443 billion a year is still a huge amount of money. Second, there’s a huge amount of fat that can be quickly and easily cut because military spending is rampant with waste, irrationality, and lack of financial accountability. Third, there is strong precedent for a massive military cut: military spending was cut in half from 1945 to 1946 in the wake of World War II. By 1948, the armed forces budget had been cut 89 percent from its wartime total, as factories converted to peacetime use. The same conversion strategy used then — deep Pentagon cuts combined with job guarantees, wage protections, retraining, union-led transition planning, and long-term public contracts for civilian production — can be used to transition us today away from an economy oriented towards destruction, towards one based on producing services and providing goods that humans actually need.
Finally, along the way to our goal of halving the budget, we should also support intermediary military budget cuts like the 10 percent proposed by Bernie Sanders. Realistically, it will probably be through the accretion of such partial steps forward that we’ll achieve our goals. In part, that’s because it will take time to reconfigure and transition the plants currently being used to produce weapons and military goods. But in that process, it’s crucial we keep the public’s eye on the prize of a dramatically different US military.
The problem with modest proposed military budget cuts on their own isn’t just that they don’t free up enough money for domestic programs. It’s also important that we spark a serious national debate about how the United States can begin relating to the world in a way that does not hinge on domination and exploitation.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. noted that the US government was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” That remains true today. But it doesn’t have to remain true tomorrow.
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