system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I believe that public school teachers in the U.S. should make double to triple their average salary. A large portion of the money for this should be taken from the federal defense budget. CMV

As it is now the average salary for being a teacher in the U.S. hovers right around $50,000, although in some states it's as high as $70,000.  Right now I think it's safe to say that teaching is not a competitive market.  If you are a really bright student in school, what fields do counselors or advisers encourage you to go into?  Among others primarily law and medicine, and this is because they are very competitive fields with high salaries.  This attracts our best people into being those things because you can make a lot of money doing those things.  I'm not saying that doctors and lawyers aren't important to society, or that bright students shouldn't be proud of becoming a doctor or a lawyer (well, maybe a lawyer).  

What I'm saying is that teachers are diametrically important to developing a better society because, in America at least, EVERYONE is legally obligated to attend school school as a child and is influenced by educators, either positively or negatively.  If being a teacher was a bad ass job where you're making at least 6 figures students would dream of being a teacher and study their asses off to become the best teacher they could because only the top students were accepted into teaching positions.  This would inject the teaching work force with our best and brightest people (the desired effect obviously being improving the quality of education received by students overall).  And if this were a government initiative (where they put the extra money into the education system for higher salaries, better equipment/facilities etc.) the students who would be most impacted by this would be the ones who went to public schools.  Now a quality education isn't only available to those who live in the right school districts or who can afford to send their kids to private schools.  Hopefully the biggest effect from this would be that education would become more dynamic and exciting for students.  If this is true than every field that has an educational prerequisite would become better/more competitive, thus greatly improving our country in multiple dimensions.

In 2010 the government estimated that there were a little over 3.1 million teachers employed by public schools in this country with less than 2% growth. If we doubled the teaching salary in public schools, the average teacher in the US would be making about $100,000 a year.  To do this it would cost the US government roughly 150 billion dollars (I am estimating this figure based on publicly available census records put out by the U.S. Census Bureau).  Now I'm not saying that the entirety of this sum should be simply cut and pasted from the DOD budget, but even if we did take that approach, that figure is only a little over 20% of their annual budget.  Now a figure smaller than 20% could be supplemented by tax dollars and other creative methods that the government uses to get money.  And I'm guessing our country wouldn't implode overnight if we cut back on military spending and didn't involve ourselves in foreign conflicts as much.
gpt
The only way that doubling the pay of teachers would have any effect was if there was some kind of competitive market for the job AND that market could not be flooded.  

The first is currently not true because teachers are not measured or sought after in the same way that engineers, accountants, or other higher dollar professions are.  Great teachers make no more money than mediocre ones.  Only the truly awful/abusive get fired. 

THe second is not true now, and would be even less true in a high-dollar scenario.   Teaching has a very low barrier to entry. Essentially any adult can do it.... although we expect college degrees. With today's college graduation rate that cuts the pool roughly in half, but that is still an ENORMOUS number of qualified individuals.   That many applicants is going to drive the price of teachers right back down from where you try to set it.

A final point... the United States spends more per student than nearly any other country on the planet. Our spending per student had gone up every decade AFTER inflation since statistics began in the 1960s.  Whatever our problems are in education, the evidence does not suggest that lack of funding is one of them.