Have things really gotten that bad? →
U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people →
robbing the public and spending irresponsibly →
bloated military budget →
fake Pentagon belt-tightening
Those of us still hoping for proof of the “starve the beast” theory of shrinking government in the future by running up debts today have cause to get our hopes up a little higher this week:
Alas, the article goes on to set up the math for us, and these cuts don’t really amount to much:
The Pentagon’s budget for , was $310 billion.
For , which was approved before the attacks, it was $317 billion, and in subsequent years, rose to $355 billion, $368 billion, and $416 billion.
These figures do not include supplemental appropriations for war-fighting efforts.
In , the Pentagon estimated it would need $424 billion for and $445 billion for , not including supplemental funding.
Officials say those figures could both end up shrinking by $10 billion and that similar cuts could occur in subsequent years.
So, the Pentagon’s budget goes up by a third in the years since Dubya took office but starting now… it won’t rise nearly so fast.
Well, it’s a start.
The actual numbers for and were $536 billion and $527 billion, not including war supplementals.
The New York Times profiles nonviolent resistance scholar Gene Sharp, who developed the training and resources that have been drawn on by activists in the recent Egyptian and Tunisian revolts, among others.
Speaking of nonviolent action, I notice that the War Resisters’ International pamphlet on Training for Nonviolent Action is now freely available on-line.
Do you pay Medicare Part B health insurance premiums?
Are you self-employed?
If so, the IRS has never let you take this expense as a self-employed health insurance expense, like the rest of us with ordinary health insurance can.
But now they’ve abruptly, and without much fanfare, changed their minds.
Obama’s new budget increases military funding (the Pentagon budget “cuts” you may be reading about in the press aren’t actual cuts but reductions in the previously anticipated budget increases — like claiming you got a pay cut at the end of the year because you only got a 10% raise and you were hoping for 15%), includes more money for the IRS, and increases funding for the War on Drug Users.
It probably cuts some program you like, though.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
First off, you may have heard some talk in the news about cuts to the Pentagon budget. You should be aware that it’s hooey. What the talk is really about is proposed reductions to the budget increases that the Pentagon had been hopefully anticipating. The Pentagon budget is still going up in both real and nominal dollars. This talk of “cuts” is like a sign in a store reading “25% Off our recently-doubled price!”
Richard Cebula and Edgar L. Feige have attempted to estimate the size of the underground economy in the United States. They estimate that 18–19% of legally-reportable income in the U.S. stays under-the-table, which translates to about half a trillion dollars in taxes each year that the IRS fails to collect. The IRS itself hasn’t attempted to measure this underground economy since .
The Greek “We Won’t Pay” movement, which is resisting the stealth tax the Greek government imposed in the form of sharply hiked utility rates, has notched up a victory in court, winning an injunction preventing the utility company from shutting off power to resisters who have refused to pay the extra amount in their bills.
Jerry DePyper has beefed up his Pro-life Strike Manifesto — which advocates tax resistance in the service of anti-abortion activism — since I last visited his site. It has a good overview of the whys and hows of tax resistance, with many parallels to the war tax resistance movement.
In other news…
The IRS is among the agencies being hit by the budget “sequester” everyone’s been gabbing about.
If Congress doesn’t pass yet another piece of misguided legislation further on down the road (big if, that), the agency will need to lop about $600 million out of its budget.
They’re hoping to make some of these cuts not to their operational budget but to the payouts it makes to people in the form of refundable tax credits and informer payoffs (which at least one commentator thinks the agency has no authority to do).
The Obama administration and the various government agencies and government-funded programs that are facing sequester-related budget cuts are making shameless use of “The Washington Monument Ploy” in which they claim the cuts will necessitate threats to the most popular, picturesque, and sentimental parts of their spending.
The military-industrial complex has been particularly shameful about this ploy, with Obama as its spokesman.
“Already, the threat of these cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf,” he claimed, which would be delightful if it weren’t bullshit.
Turns out, though, that it actually is easier for the Pentagon to make abrupt cuts to mission-critical operations (things the military just happens to do for historical reasons, like fight wars) than to cut corporate welfare political pork projects (the real meat & potatoes).
And just in time for events like these the War Resisters League has just updated their popular “pie chart” flyer which is meant to show the percentage of your income tax dollar that goes to military spending.
The chart is based on Obama’s proposed budget for , but from what I hear, nobody really expects his budget to even come up for a vote.
Instead, a divided Congress will wrangle their own budget together.
Knowing that his budget would be ignored by Congress, Obama decided to use it more as a public relations vehicle than an actual budget.
Part of this public relations included Pentagon budget “cuts” which, though they’re the sort of “cuts” that always seem to leave the budget bigger than it was last year, and though they are accompanied by an anticipated supplemental slush-fund that isn’t part of the budget, still raised howls from the usual warmongers.
In any case, the real budget Congress passes is predicted to stuff all of the usual military pork back in.
So the “pie chart,” which is based on the for-show Obama budget, as bad as it looks, probably understates how dreadful the budget will end up looking.
