Your
Tax Dollars at War: More Than 53% of Your Tax Payment Goes
to the Military
16 April 2010By Dave Lindorff
If you’re like me, now that we’re in the week that
federal income taxes are due, you are finally starting
to collect your records and prepare for the ordeal.
Either way, whether you are a procrastinator like me,
or have already finished and know how much you have
paid to the government, it is a good time to stop and
consider how much of your money goes to pay for our
bloated and largely useless and pointless military.
The budget for the 2011 fiscal year, which has to be
voted by Congress by this Oct. 1, looks to be about $3
trillion, not counting the funds collected for Social
Security (since the Vietnam War, the government has
included the Social Security Trust Fund in the budget
as a way to make the cost of America’s imperial
military adventures seem smaller in comparison to the
total cost of government). Meanwhile, the military
share of the budget works out to about $1.6 trillion.
That figure includes the Pentagon budget request of
$717 billion, plus an estimated $200 billion in
supplemental funding (called “overseas contingency
funding” in euphemistic White House-speak), to fund
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, some $40 billion or
more in “black box” intelligence agency funding, $94
billion in non-DOD military spending (that would
include stuff like military activies funded through
NASA, military spending by the State Department, etc.,
miilitary-related activities within the Dept. of
Homeland Security, etc.), $123 billion in veterans
benefits and health care spending, and $400 billion in
interest on debt raised to pay for prior wars and the
standing military during peacetime (whatever that
is!).
The 2011 military budget, by the way, is the largest
in history, not just in actual dollars, but in
inflation-adjusted dollars, exceeding even the
spending in World War II, when the nation was on an
all-out war footing.
This military spending in all its myriad forms works
out to represent 53% of total US federal spending.
It’s also a military budget that is rising at a faster
pace than any other part of the budget (with the
possible exception of bailing out crooked Wall Street
financial firms and their managers). For the past
decade, and continuing under the present
administration, military budgets have been rising at a
9% annual clip, making health care inflation look tiny
by comparison.
US military spending isn’t just half of the US budget,
though. It is also half of the entire global spending
on war and weaponry. In 2009, according to the
venerable War Resisters League, US military spending
accounted for 47% of all money spent globally on war,
weapons and military preparedness (it's probably
closer to 50% now). What makes that staggering figure
particularly ridiculous is that America’s
allies--countries like France, Britain, Germany,
Italy, and Japan--account for another 21% of the
world’s military spending. Fully 12 of the
top-spenders among big military-spending nations are
either allies of the US, or are friendly or completely
non-threatening countries like Brazil and India. That
is to say, America and its friends and allies account
for more than two-thirds of all military spending
worldwide.
China, in contrast, probably the closest thing to a
real “threat” to American interests because of
America’s treaty commitments to the island nation of
Taiwan, and China’s counter claim that the island is a
part of the PRC, spends only some $130 billion on its
military, much of which is actually devoted to
maintaining military control over the country’s own
1.3 billion people, some of whom might prefer to be
independent, or to be freer, if they weren't under the
military jack-boot.
The next biggest military spender, Russia, spends less
than $80 billion a year on its decrepit
military--about one-twentieth of what the US
spends--and isn’t even technically an enemy of the
America anymore. Its military is largely busy keeping
restive regions from spinning off from the mother
country, anyhow.
Meanwhile Iran, which the White House and Congress are
portraying as America’s arch enemy, despite its not
having invaded another country in hundreds of years,
isn’t even on the list of the top 17 military
big-spenders. Iran’s current military budget is a
teensy $4.8 billion (no surprise since its economy is
about equal to Finland's), about the same as the
estimated $5 billion spent on the military by North
Korea--America’s other “major enemy.” Each of those
country’s military budgets is about one-quarter of the
military budget of Australia. Combined, they add up to
about two thirds of the military budget of the
Netherlands.
Just to give one an idea of how small $4.8 billion is
in comparison to the $1.6 trillion that the US is
spending each year on war and planning for war, that
number is roughly what the Pentagon plans to spend
over the next year on childcare and youth programs,
morale and recreation programs and commissaries on its
bases! It’s about what the Pentagon will spend
acquiring replacement Seahawk, Chinook and Blackhawk
helicopters this year.
For the average American, what all this means is that
of every dollar you send to the IRS, 53 cents will be
going to pay for blowing stuff up, fattening the
wallets of colonels admirals and generals, bloating
the portfolios of investors in military industries,
and of course funding the bonuses paid to executives
of those companies, and the campaign chests and
private expense accounts of the members of Congress
who vote for these outlandish budgets. Your money will
also be going to pay for the salaries and the bullets
of those brave heroes over in Afghanistan who are
executing kids, killing pregnant women (and then
digging out the bullets and claiming they were stabbed
by their families), and for the anti-personnel weapons
that are creating legions of legless Afghani kids.
Next time you hear that the government needs to cut
funds for providing medical care to the children of
laid-off workers, or that supplemental unemployment
funds are running out, next time you hear that federal
funds that are needed to fund extra teachers at your
school are being cut, or that Social Security benefits
need to be cut back, or the retirement age needs to be
increased to 70, next time you hear that your local
post office has to be shut down for lack of funds,
next time you hear that Medicare benefits need to be
reduced, think about that 53% of your tax payment that
is going to finance the most enormous war machine the
world has ever known.
And ask yourself: Is this really necessary? Is this
really where I want my money going? Is this really
even making me safer or my country stronger?
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EsinIslam.Com
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