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

[marmar]

Published on Friday, April 1, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Tax Day in America: A People Without a Vision Will Perish

by Joseph Gerson


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. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/01-3