There’s an old protest sign I can’t stop thinking about. It read, “It will be a great day in America when our schools have all the money that they need and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale to pay for a bomber.” Well, how about for an aircraft carrier?

USS Gerald Ford. Photo: US Navy.

There’s an old protest sign I can’t stop thinking about. It read, “It will be a great day in America when our schools have all the money that they need and the Pentagon has to hold a bake sale to pay for a bomber.” Well, how about for an aircraft carrier?

Where I am, in a rural part of New York state, the radio is packed with appeals from nearby food pantries where, after 43 days of government shutdown, volunteers are terrified that they’ll run out of supplies before Thanksgiving.

With Congress reopening, some safety net spending will be restored, but around here, SNAP budgets don’t come close to meeting real people’s actual food costs. Long before the shutdown, one in five children was going hungry, with 24% of children living in poverty according to the local data-crunchers, and that’s been consistent for years now.

While my neighbors on SNAP are supposed to be happy to receive modest monthly benefits (up to about $298 for a single person), drive two hours south, or about 100 miles to Wall Street, and people with money to spare are celebrating record-high stock market gains and their brokers anticipate end-of-year bonuses that are on track to surge as much as 25% over last year’s.

The end-of-year bump the rest of us will see is in our health insurance premiums. They’re about to double, triple, or quadruple, for some 20 million Americans. In addition, fifteen million Americans can expect to be thrown off Medicaid, and all to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the richest 1% of us, courtesy of a Congress packed with millionaires whose health insurance is almost entirely paid for by taxpayers (thanks to a national healthcare plan they won’t let the rest of us in on).

Meanwhile, a dangerous-looking military deployment in the Caribbean continues, gobbling up Congressionally-appropriated dollars that will never be honestly calculated. As of late November 2025, (according to Wikipedia), the U.S. has deployed at least 15 major warships to the Caribbean, including:

  • The USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier and its escort destroyers.

  • Guided-missile destroyers (USS Gravely, USS Jason Dunham, USS Stockdale, USS Winston Churchill, USS Mahan).

  • Guided-missile cruiser (USS Gettysburg, USS Lake Erie).

  • Amphibious assault ships (USS Iwo Jima, USS San Antonio, USS Fort Lauderdale).

  • Littoral combat ships (USS Wichita, USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul).

  • A nuclear-powered attack submarine (USS Newport News).

  • Special operations vessels (MV Ocean Trader).

Take just one: the USS Gerald Ford which has just pulled into the Caribbean. It cost $13 billion to build (another $4 billion more to develop). When the government was “shut down” it was not. It was eating up an estimated $8 million per day to operate, and that’s not including the cost of jet fuel for its 90-plus aircraft. When the USS Ford stopped for gas soon after it launched, it took a couple of days and close to a million gallons. At a mid price of $4/gallon, that’s $4 million to fill its tanks.

The annual cost of continuing Affordable Care Act (ACA) healthcare subsidies is about $30 billion per year, or roughly $82 million per day.​ This means that the daily cost of operating a single aircraft carrier is roughly equivalent to about 10% of the daily cost of maintaining ACA healthcare subsidies for the entire country. Put another way, the amount spent on one carrier in a single day could fund ACA subsidies for hundreds of thousands of Americans for that same day. Add the cost of this entire dangerous Gulf escapade, and the immoral sum could cover SNAP beneficiaries past Christmas.

Donald Trump and his war secretary say their deployment is all about fighting narco-terrorism and getting tough on crime. But who is getting tough on our misplaced priorities — and the crime of poverty in this country? It’s time we elected some people who had actually lived through the experience.

The post One Aircraft Carrier or Health Care Coverage for Tens of Thousands? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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