Military Marching Bands: Your Tax Dollars At Work - NPR
I listened to this on the way home today. My take? Don’t decimate the Military Marching Bands, but geeze, cut it back a bit??
The stuff we don’t know.
The U.S. spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year on dozens of military marching bands, rock groups, jazz ensembles, choruses and country music performance teams. In light of the current economic climate, some are wondering if this is excessive and unnecessary spending. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post has written a series of columns on the cost of military music, and says he was prompted to looking into the matter after hearing Defense Secretary Gates discuss budget priorities.
Here’s Walter Pincus’ columns.
“There are about 6,000 FSOs,” or Foreign Service officers, he told an audience in San Francisco this month. He drew laughter when he added that former secretary of state “Condi Rice used to say, ‘We have more people in military bands than they have in the Foreign Service.’ She was not far wrong.”