How does it feel to know that nearly 60% of your tax dollars this year will pay for our present and

[sasha031]

Tax Day in America: A People Without a Vision Will Perish

How does it feel to know that nearly 60% of your tax dollars this year will pay for our present and future wars, not for your family’s or communities’ needs?Our nation is in trouble, and the diagnosis is as old as the Bible, which warns that “A people without a vision will perish”. Our nation has lost its way, and its people are in trouble. People continue to lose their jobs, services, and economic security, while we spend ever greater sums in the disastrous pursuit of global military supremacy.

Consider: the combined debt of our fifty states is $140 billion. That’s a lot of money, about what we spend annually for the self-defeating “wars of choice” in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya. They will likely have cost $3 trillion by the time our grandchildren finish paying for them.Our nation spends roughly as much for war and war preparations as the rest of the world combined. Does that buy real security? Our people suffer the highest infant mortality rate of any industrialized developed nation, and infant morality is a key indicator of a nation’s societal and future economic health. We’ve suffered a tsunami of housing foreclosures, and we have yet to find our way out of the “jobless recovery” from the country’s greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/01-3

[Shagbark Hickory]

1. I'll tell you how it makes me feel. It makes me really fucking mad. Mad enought to become some kind

of tea party type mad crazy person.

[polichick]

2. It makes me sick. I think that somewhere in our tax return we should be able to say...

...how we want our money spent - categories like WAR, INFRASTRUCTURE, EDUCATION, GREEN ENERGY SUBSIDIES, OIL SUBSIDIES, etc.

[sasha031]

3. yes, how often I have thought of that

:mad:

[groovedaddy]

4. I have been a proponent of directed tax dollars. What in the hell is that, you ask?

I propose that our federal tax forms allow us to delineate where our tax dollars go. A given # of areas where federal tax dollars are spent will be listed on the form (i.e. defense, education, healthcare, transporation, etc.) and we get to direct the percentage of tax dollars we want to go into any given area.

I know, it's an extreme stretch that this would ever happen, but it would sure make me feel better about how my tax dollars are spent.

[sinkingfeeling]

5. Psst, you must of missed the posts about the survey that says Americans don't have a clue about

where their tax money actually goes.

[groovedaddy]

6. I don't doubt that at all. But if provided with an easy way to direct their tax dollars

I bet they'd start paying a little more attention.

[EstimatedProphet]

7. But we do have a vision. It's called Pax Americana.

We're the Big Bad Americans, large and in charge of the whole world. That's our vision.

[Jack Sprat]

8. You know how it makes me feel.

I feel ashamed, disgusted, sad, distraught, desperate, and decadent for being a citizen and not ending this travesty before now. We could end this betrayal of our citizens. But we can't do it individually with elections. That should be evident by now.

[EnviroBat]

9. It makes me feel like no longer being a citizen of this fucked up country anymore.

My girlfriend and I have been having serious discussions lately about leaving the U.S. before they make it impossible to leave. We see it going that way. They would prevent people from leaving to keep the revenue stream intact. Fuck this place. We're getting tired of being ripped off, and the lethargic coma of everyone just sitting around and watching it happen. She is working on finishing her masters degree, and once that is done we start looking to pick a new home outside of the U.S. I'll probably leave my home to the bank. It was just a bad business decision, that's all. Every corporation on the planet can shirk their responsibilities, then by God, so the fuck can I...