Iraq and Afghanistan More Costly Than All 50 States COMBINED
I know this shouldn’t have surprised me, but seeing it still caused me to gasp.
This country is spending more on killing and destroying in Afghanistan and Iraq than all 50 states COMBINED spend on EVERYTHING.
I tell you right now, if we don’t stop this shit, we deserve to come to a Soviet end. That, at least, would stop a hell of a lot of warring. American kids wouldn’t be dying overseas anymore, and maybe Iraqi and Afghani kids would have a chance at surviving.
Hell, maybe the states could address some of their problems if they weren’t having to ship that war money off to Washington.
The U.S. spends more for war annually than all state governments combined spend for the health, education, welfare, and safety of 308 million Americans.
Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C., says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes in 2008.
For a rough comparison, according to Wikipedia data, the total budget for what the Pentagon calls “defense” in fiscal year 2010 will be at least $880 billion and could possibly top $1 trillion. That’s more than all the state governments collect.
Henchman says all American local governments combined (cities, counties, etc.) collect about $500 billion in taxes. Add that to total state tax take and you get over $1.3 trillion. This means Uncle Sam’s Pentagon is sopping up nearly as much money as all state, county, city, and other governmental units spend to run the country.
If the Pentagon figure of $1 trillion is somewhat less than all other taxing authorities, keep in mind the FBI, the various intelligence agencies, the VA, the National Institutes of Health (biological warfare) are also spending on war-related activities.
A question that describes the above and answers itself is: In what area can the Federal government operate where states and cities cannot tread? The answer is: foreign affairs–raising armies, fighting wars, conducting diplomacy, etc. And so Uncle Sam keeps enlarging this area. His emphasis is not on diplomacy, either.
For every buck spent by the State Department, which gets some $50 billion a year, the Pentagon spends $20. As for the Peace Corps, its budget is a paltry $375 million–hardly enough to keep the Pentagon elephant in peanuts.
Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz and finance authority Linda Bilmes write in their “The Three Trillion Dollar War” (W.W. Norton), “defense spending has been growing as a percentage of discretionary funding (money that is not required to be spent on entitlements like Social Security), from 48 percent in 2000 to 51 percent today. That means that our defense needs are gobbling up a larger share of taxpayers’ money than ever before.”
And they add, “The Pentagon’s budget has increased by more than $600 billion, cumulatively, since we invaded Iraq.” With its 1,000 bases in the U.S. and another 800 bases globally, the U.S. truly has become a “Warfare State.” Today, military-related products account for about one-fourth of total U.S. GDP. This includes 10,000 nuclear weapons. Indeed, the U.S. has lavished $5.5 trillion just on nukes over the past 70 years.
Perspective…… the DPRK is estimated to spend about 25% of its GDP on its military. We all know what’s happened to (at least) hundreds of thousands of North Koreans as a result.
How can being “the land of the free” coexist alongside being a belligerent military state?
That’s right. It can’t. It’s time to end this.
Tags: afghanistan, iraq, military spending
