DUMMERSTON, Vt. - Take a look inside President Bush's proposed $2.9 trillion federal budget for fiscal year 2008, and you'll see more of the same old thing - more money for war-making and tax cuts for the rich, less money for everybody else.
The president wants to spend $481 billion on defense, plus another $145 billion for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Put together, that's $628 billion for war - and that doesn't include the $19 billion the federal Department of Energy gets for nuclear weapons research.
According to William Hartung, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and an expert on military issues, this is the highest level of military spending since the end of World War II. It is more money than every other nation in the world combined spends on its military. It is more than the combined gross domestic products of all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The proposed budget for just the Iraq war is larger than Russia's and China's military spending - combined.
As for those tax cuts, if you make more than $1 million a year, you're looking at an average tax cut of $162,000 a year by 2012. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, those in the top 1 percent of income earners would get 31 percent of the president's proposed tax cuts, while the bottom 40 percent would get just 4 percent.
So what's getting cut to pay for this?
- The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which provides help for poor families struggling to pay their heating bills, is being cut by $1.1 billion.
- The Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which last year provided more than 6.4 million food packages for low-income seniors and families with young children, is being eliminated. Also, elderly housing programs will receive $172 million less.
- The Community Block Grant Program, which provides $1.6 billion of funding for emergency food assistance, affordable housing and community development programs, is being eliminated, and $1 billion is being cut from job training and employment services.
- Education programs will take a big hit as Head Start is being cut by $436 million, special education loses $669 million and the Child Care and Development Block Grant program loses $111 million.
- In health care spending, rural health programs will see an 87 percent budget cut and the National Institutes of Health will get a $310 million cut.
In short, about $13 billion in cuts to nonmilitary-related items are being proposed, while this nation plans to spend 58 cents of every dollar of federal discretionary spending on the military.
Even worse, little of this military money is being spent on equipment and weapons that U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan badly need. According to Hartung, it's going instead toward Cold War-era weapons systems such as the F-22 fighter ($4.6 billion), the CVN-21 aircraft carrier ($3.1 billion), the SSN-774 Virginia-class attack submarine ($2.7 billion), the Trident D-5 submarine-launched missile ($1.2 billion) and ballistic missile defense ($10.8 billion).
In the San Francisco Chronicle last week, Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, wrote that about $60 billion of the defense budget now devoted to unneeded and now-obsolete Cold War weaponry could be cut without effecting the military's ability to fight terrorists.
Cohen, now the head of Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, said that the $60 billion in savings could be used for other things - from providing health insurance to the 9 million children who don't have it to rebuilding and modernizing public schools or expanding energy conservation programs. The funding for all the aforementioned social service, education and health care program slated for cuts could be restored.
As with so many things, what it will take is Congress having enough guts to cut non-essential defense spending and reallocate that money toward other pressing needs.
The problem is that defense spending is the ultimate example of corporate welfare. Virtually every congressional district in the country gets funding for defense-related programs. And virtually every member of Congress fights to get more of this money.
Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 25 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.
US Military budget- $460 billion
Russia- $70 billion
China- $40 billion
The axis of evil- less than $10 billion
How much is wasted, a good example is the republicans touting that they have cut gov't costs by privatizing some gov't jobs. The gov't jobs averaged, say, $40 an hour including benefits. The private company now charges $105+/hour. WTF
How about the guy who won the body armor contract (900,000 vests) and then proceeded to provide an inferior and defective product. Then, for shits and giggles, because he was making some serious coin, he throws his daughter a $10,000,000 Bat Mitzva.
Just by eliminating the mercenaries that we are hiring (i.e. Blackwater) we could save billions and give our military boys a significant raise. Thats got to be a slap in the face of our military men and women fighting next to ex-military making 5X what they are making, while doing the nastier chores.
We need a massive audit on the pentagon. We are almost spending more than every country on earth combined!!!
by
denvan (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 3 diaries, 28 comments)
on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at 6:30:41 PM
For a couple years I've been blaming it on lack of sleep, not enough
sunshine, too much pressure from my job, earwax buildup, poor blood or anything else I
could think of.
But now I found out the real reason:
I'm tired because I'm overworked.
Here's why:. . .
The population of this country is 273 million.
140 million are retired.
That leaves 133 million to do the work.
There are 85 million in school.
Which leaves 48 million to do the work.
Of this there are 29 million employed by the federal government.
Leaving 19 million to do the work.
2.8 million are in the armed forces preoccupied with killing Osama Bin-Laden.
Which leaves 16.2 million to do the work.
Take from that total the 14.8 million people who work for state and city
governments.
And that leaves 1.4 million to do the work.
At any given time there are 188,000 people in hospitals.
Le aving 1,212,000 to do the work.
Now, there are 1,211,998 people in prisons.
That leaves just two people to do the work.
You and me.
And there you are, sitting at your computer, reading jokes.
Nice. Real nice.
by
Fred F (1 articles, 1 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 363 comments)
on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 at 9:55:15 PM
We live in a country currently governed by white-collar criminals who devise laws specifically designed to serve and protect white-collar criminals. That's called laissez-faire Capitalism, but surely Cannibalism is closer to the mark.
Capitalism is a system devised by and for those who control capital, and they use their economic and political power to increase their wealth by robbing the masses. This occurs every moment of every day on an individual level in the private sector, but the real money is stolen from taxpayers en masse at the government level by politicians and political appointees who currently govern our country.
In theory, government is the pump that disperses wealth like water to the masses.
Republicans exclusively serve the wealthiest two or three per cent of the population, and they promise but never deliver any trickle down. Democrats spread the loot in a wider swath to the wealthiest twenty or thirty per cent of the population, delivering moderate trickle down to the middleclass and basic subsistence to the poor. Democrats call it egalitarianism. Republicans call it socialism.
That's the primary difference between Republicans and Democrats, but they are still kissing cousins.
.
by
rabblerowzer (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 227 comments)
on Thursday, February 15, 2007 at 4:11:36 AM
