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Your Tax Dollars at War:
More Than 53% of Your Tax Payment Goes to the Military
By Dave Lindorff'
April 13, 2010 "Information Clearing House" - -If youre like me, now that were 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 Americas 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.
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brewens
(13,620 posts)for inflation. That should give you an idea how bad we're being screwed. No way it should be like that. The looting and profiteering are off the charts.
The outsourcing to these private contractors is probably half the problem. A lot of our guys in the military want to "go Blackwater" to make the big bucks, doing jobs our military used to handle. The contractor then does a crappy job, pays the guys the big money and then charges us enough to also make a nice profit.
Thank Dick Cheney for that. How did people get duped into thinking that was a good deal? The military used to have it's own trucks and drivers, security details, chow halls and cooks. There was nothing wrong with the way they handled all that in WWII.
He assumes that no borrowed money for the current budget goes to the military. The military's funded out of actual revenues. (The "53%" leaves no other option.)
In 2011 interest on the national debt was $277 billion. In order to have the interest payment for 2012 be $400 he has to assume that any debt in past years that can be attributed to the military must be attributed to the military.
Notice the contradictio. If the first assumption is true then the interest payment for the military would be vanishingly small and he deprives himself of one of his big claims. If his second assumption is true then the portion of tax revenue going to the military this year would be zero and he deprives himself of another of his big claims.
Characteristically, the writer manages to adopt mutually exclusive assumptions state that his desired conclusion is true. I assume he manages to find other assumptions that deny the truth of these two in order to continue to maintain his usual standards of intellectual rigor and loyalty to the truth.
Initech
(100,102 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Us as in General Electric, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin...