Or a massive bloated military budget. The US spends something like $700 billion on its armed forces. Imagine what an extra $5billion could do for secondary age (11-18) schools in the US and what little effect that would have on the US military?
Between 1 and 1.4 trillion in 2012, overall. Federal spending was pegged at 681 billion
according to the source (which I found
here -- it's an .xls file. You can see the notes on the wikipedia part to see where the discrepancy's coming from.), and education at 91 billion -- but only 39 billion of that going to K-12 education (including vocational training) and 20 to higher education. It'd take less than a 10% (~8.6%) cut to the military spending listed there to have flat out
doubled primary et al and higher education spending in 2012. Total spending on what's normally called welfare here (unemployment, food and housing assistance -- only one of which, unemployment, involves "just handing out money for fun") was around 200 billion. You'd have to cut that by better than a forth to double education spending. For what it's worth, we spend more than half as much on veteran benefits as we do on overall welfare (of the sort mentioned: ~120 billion vs ~200 billion).
Plain cash disbursement (especially to folks that aren't unemployed) isn't actually much of th'states' welfare spending, and is more or less a pittance of the overall budget. The big hits are military, medicare, and social security... and at least one of those we could
probably stand to loosen up on, just a titch.
As for that five billion. Would be an 8.4% increase in the 2012 education budget for primary et al and higher education, in exchange for a .7% decrease in defense spending. 2.4% decrease in welfare spending, 4% decrease in veteran spending, if you were to draw from one of those, instead. .6% if you were to roll veteran spending into overall military.
Which... should probably help understand why there's this certain subset of folks who want to cut military spending and redirect it into, y'know, other things. As th'states' spending goes, military is one of the less directly necessary or beneficial things money's being spent on, and so much is being spent on it the nation could get
significant gains (budgetary, in any case), in other areas. Areas that are considerably more likely to have notable benefit back
home, as opposed to pissing off the rest of the world and crippling a fair number of our youth. Being fair, also fending off some of the people we've pissed off, but... yeah.