The War Resisters League has issued its famous “Pie Chart” fly­er show­ing “Where Your Income Tax Mon­ey Real­ly Goes”:http://warresisters.org/piechart.htm. An annu­al tra­di­tion, this fly­er breaks down U.S. gov­ern­ment spending.
This year 49% of income-tax gen­er­at­ed fed­er­al spend­ing is going to the mil­i­tary. That’s $536 bil­lion for cur­rent mil­i­tary spend­ing, $349 bil­lion to pay for past mil­i­tary spend­ing and a pro­ject­ed $50 bil­lion that the Pres­i­dent will ask Con­gress for after the elections.
There’s just so much wrong with this amount of mil­iary spend­ing. This is mon­ey that could be going into job cre­ation, into sup­port­ing afford­able health care for Amer­i­cans, into giv­ing our kids bet­ter edu­ca­tion. The strongest defense a coun­try could ever have is invest­ing in its peo­ple, but that’s impos­si­ble if we’re spend­ing half of our tax­es on bombs. And hav­ing all these bombs around makes us itchy to use them and gives us the abil­i­ty to fight wars large­ly by ourselves.
The WRL fly­er always goes beyond mere num­ber crunch­ing, how­ev­er, to show some of the human impact of this inbal­anced spend­ing. This time we have list­ings of “lives lost in Afghanistan & iraq,” lives lost due to poor health stan­dards around the world, the lost free­dom of pris­on­ers being held by the U.S. against the Gene­va Accords, and the friends “lost and found” by the U.S.‘s uni­lat­er­al­ist war.