How does this help our nation? Oops I said the N-word, my apologies to the offended parties.
By recycling it into something useful (weapons into plowshares and all that) instead of it sitting around costing money through expensive guarding, monitoring and maintenance not to mention Russia under the treaty dismantling nuclear warheads that were meant for killing us. Oh, and 0% chance of it accidentally going off once it's dismantled versus the extremely small percentage chance beforehand.
All else being equal, a nation that spends 10% of it's resourced building machines of war will have a lower standard of living then a nation that's able to spend that 10% on things like education, infrastructure, or even private commercial ventures / R&D. Hence war being destructive to the economy in the sense that you're sinking resources into production that doesn't return value to you in the form of making your life better. Sort of like there's money to be made in boarding up houses after a fire but setting a bunch of fires doesn't help stimulate the economy.
Realistically, however; Things are a lot more complex as always and there are other factors involved like the nation that did spend 10% using their machines of war to take what the nation that didn't made or value returned in the ability to exert your will on other nations ect ect. But it's always a net loss for humanity as a whole....until the aliens come
There's this concept call "thinking" that has been catching on. You ought to try it sometime. Contrary to your moronic statement, governments do not spend money on things "for the greater good of humanity". They spend money on things that are good for their nation. How much money do you think that the countries affected by malaria have to spend on developing a vaccine for malaria?
If only there were some sort of organized union of nations that each paid towards operating costs in order to work on world issues of security, health and economic development.
Oh, I definitely agree with you there. As more and more of the population stays in school I think there is undoubtedly a pressure on teachers to try to keep average grades up and failure rates down which results in cases of relaxing standards. This doesn't mean the population is getting less intelligent or less educated though, it simply means the average graduate may be less intelligent, but now a much larger percentage of the population is attempting to graduate and learn and the population on the whole is getting better educated.
Imagine if you will that you switched from how cross country teams are now to having everyone forced to be on the cross country team, run and exercise. You might look at average run times for the team and exclaim that the population is getting slower and worse at running and that the system must be broken, but this is not the case. Now you simply have more people being pushed to run instead of the people who were already inclined and in a good position to do so. Forcing all these people to do training runs would mean the population as a whole is getting better at running, even though your average scores for your "team" would seem to disagree.
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.