Wealth & Money Quote by Robert Fulghum

A “bake-sale to buy a bomber” is a punchline with teeth: it shrinks the majestic machinery of war into the petty logistics of cupcakes and folding tables. Fulghum’s intent isn’t policy wonkery; it’s moral bookkeeping. By flipping the usual funding hierarchy, he makes the current one feel newly absurd, like we’ve been living with a typo in our national budget and calling it realism.

The line works because it borrows the imagery of underfunded public schools most Americans already recognize: parents hustling for art supplies, teachers buying basics out of pocket. That familiar indignity becomes the measuring stick. When he applies it to the Air Force, the subtext snaps into focus: scarcity is not fate, it’s a choice about what we honor. The joke masks an accusation. We routinely treat children’s development as optional, but we treat military capacity as sacred, self-justifying, beyond the realm of bake-sale humility.

Context matters here. Fulghum emerged as a popular essayist of humane, plainspoken wisdom, writing in an America where defense spending remained politically resilient even as schools became a perennial crisis story. His rhetorical move is deliberately small-town: he doesn’t cite numbers, he stages a scene. That scene invites readers to feel the mismatch viscerally, not analytically, and to imagine a nation proud enough to fund learning lavishly and calm enough to make weapons compete with the PTA. The cynicism is gentle, but the critique is radical: reorder the story of what “security” means.