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 →
monetary cost of Iraq/Afghanistan wars
One Richard Parker did some interesting back-of-the-envelope calculations .
He took the $87 billion that Dubya announced he’d be asking us to pay to clean up after the adventure in Iraq, added to that the $55 billion extra that members of his administration suggest he forgot to mention.
“On a whim,” Parker writes, “I investigated whether $142 billion (87 + 55) is sufficient funds to buy enough gold to pave the highways with gold.”
He notes that at today’s prices gold costs about $12 per gram, and that there are about 330,000 “lane kilometers” of interstate highways, with each of these lanes being in the neighborhood of 3.6 meters wide.
“According to FTC labeling requirements,” Parker notes, “24kt gold plating must be at least 0.5 microns thick to be called ‘gold plate.’ ”
By his calculations, the complete U.S. interstate highway system could be gold-plated with $142 billion in gold at today’s price, with 10,000 “lane kilometers” worth of gold left over to pave a few extra roads in important congressional districts.
This begs the question, of course, of whether this would be as much of a delight and consolation to our nation’s drivers as the slump in gas prices that is anticipated when Iraqi oil starts hitting the market in quantity.
The US Congress has approved the $87.5 billion supplemental war budget.
That’s $1,000 per US taxpayer.*
* The Tax Policy Center estimates that there are 138,959,000 “estimated nondependent tax units” of which 87,284,000 actually pay taxes.
The $87,500,000,000 supplemental war budget, divided over each of these tax payers, comes to a little over $1,000. The ordinary war spending that was already part of the budget comes to about $804 billion (more or less, depending on what parts of the budget you consider to be war spending), or about $9,210 per tax payer.
Although the federal government gets most of its money to spend on these programs from the federal income tax, it also uses money it gets from corporate income taxes and some excise taxes, and also borrows money that future taxpayers have to pay.
Also, different tax payers pay different amounts of taxes so these numbers of $1,000 and $9,210 are mostly rhetorical and do not indicate that any particular tax payer can be considered to have contributed these amounts to these causes.
Batteries not included.
The Bush administration intends to seek about $70 billion in emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan , pushing total war costs close to $225 billion since , Pentagon and congressional officials said .…
In making cost estimates for the supplemental budget request, Pentagon officials have distanced themselves from the Bush administration’s public optimism about trends in Iraq.
Instead, they make the fairly pessimistic assumption that about as many troops will be needed there as are currently on the ground.…
Yale University economist William D. Nordhaus estimated that in inflation-adjusted terms, World War Ⅰ cost just under $200 billion for the United States.
The Vietnam War cost about $500 billion , Nordhaus said.
The cost of the Iraq war could reach nearly half that number by .
Well, would you just look at Salon today!
Full of news:
Deployment of extra troops, plus the need for new armor and other changes to counter insurgent tactics, may increase war spending by at least 25 percent for , say experts.
The total cost of the US military effort in Afghanistan and Iraq through next year will almost certainly surpass $200 billion.
Congress is likely to approve whatever war budget the White House asks for.
But the current rate of spending is far higher than officials predicted before hostilities began…
most congressional and administration estimates of war costs hovered in the $60 to $70 billion range.
¶ Now that figure has climbed higher.
The White House plans to ask for upwards of $80 billion in supplemental appropriations funding for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Congressional Budget Office director J. Douglas Holtz-Eakin.
That’s on top of the $25 billion for that Congress has already approved as part of the general military appropriations bill.
The need to push troop levels to 150,000, highest of the war, in advance of scheduled elections is one reason costs are going up…
The cost of the war will be some $128 billion, according to [Center for Strategic and International Studies analyst Anthony] Cordesman’s figures.
That does not include major maintenance, the replacement of destroyed equipment, and costs associated with the need to recruit more troops and retrain those deployed to Iraq.
, the cost of military operations in the Iraq theater will be between $212 billion and $232 billion, according to Cordesman.
, it could be as high as $316 billion.
Remember that $82 billion emergency funding package for the war on Iraq, the war on Terror, and the continuing relief of Porkistan?
Bush signed the bill authorizing the funding about two weeks ago, and already General Warbucks is asking for another fix:
Congressional aides report that the services have indicated they will need even more money — possibly even earlier — to cover rising operational and maintenance costs of the protracted war in Iraq.
The exact amount is unknown because defense and service officials have just started their review, but lawmakers expect a request for about another $50 billion, aides said.
The soaring wartime costs may raise eyebrows, but Congress will have to foot the bill unless lawmakers want to force an end to the U.S. military operation in Iraq simply by cutting off funds.
The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story in their edition about the effect of war spending on the U.S. economy.
Some excerpts:
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost taxpayers $314 billion, and the Congressional Budget Office projects additional expenses of perhaps $450 billion over .
That could make the combined campaigns, especially the war in Iraq, the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years, causing even some conservative experts to criticize the open-ended commitment to an elusive goal.
The concern is that the soaring costs, given little weight before now, could play a growing role in U.S. strategic decisions because of the fiscal impact.…
The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, has estimated that the Korean War cost about $430 billion and the Vietnam War cost about $600 billion, in current dollars.
According to the latest estimates, the cost of the war in Iraq could exceed $700 billion.
Put simply, critics say, the war is not making the United States safer and is harming U.S. taxpayers by saddling them with an enormous debt burden, since the war is being financed with deficit spending.…
In , the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan research arm of Congress, estimated that the war would cost $1.5 billion to $4 billion per month.
In fact, it costs between $5 billion and $8 billion per month.…
The current anti-war movement strategy of trying to discourage military recruitment is welcome and is showing signs of success.
But in this war, the U.S. government seems to be relying less on troops and more on money — by funding a foreign army to do our dirty work, hiring contractors, buying votes, and relying on an expensive arsenal that can be deployed by technicians from inside the green zone or from off-shore.
If the U.S. starts to withdraw its troops but leaves its money and its mercenaries behind to continue the occupation, what then for the anti-recruitment strategy?
Today: a grab-bag of readings from around the web —
“We Don’t Need Them” by Joe Carpenter — “I’ve never understood the idea of speaking truth to power.
The truth, surely, is that in almost all countries of the world, political and economic systems are designed to benefit only the rich and powerful, at the expense of those with less money and power.
This is how the world works, and I see no reason to think that the powerful don’t already understand that.
After all, they designed it, they maintain it.… ¶ They are very few and we, here in the U.S. alone, are roughly three hundred million.
We don’t need to rush out to tell the few that they are abusing the many.
They already know that.
We need to stand upright and walk out to tell the many that they are being slowly devoured by the few, for — incredibly, they do not know.
We need to look to our next-door neighbors, and to their next door neighbors and to the folks all along the block.
We need to tell the truth to each other — for we are the answer.
Ben Tripp at Counterpunch tries to visualize the monetary cost of the war: “Every month, the United States spends enough money killing Arabs of various kinds so that, if we instead decided to paperclip all those dollars together, we could not only reach the moon, we could come all the way back again with another chain of dollars, and still have enough dollars left over to go all the way around the equator ($262,954,560) 3.8 times… And that is every month.
¶ …Where are all these dollars coming from?
You can’t slip that kind of loot out of mom’s purse.
These dollars are coming from foreign governments and financial institutions.
The USA has borrowed all this money from people that don’t even use dollars at home!
How many Chinese yuan does it take to reach the moon?
We’re about to find out.
Since G. W. Bush took office (and he did take it), his government has borrowed $1.05 trillion.
That is to say, over one thousand billion.
Remember how many a billion is?
$1.05 trillion is more than the total borrowed by every administration ($1.01 trillion).
The mind implodes.
Half of this nation’s debt in 224 years, the other half since Junior Bush got the top job.
Remember how far away the sun is?
We have spent enough dollars to get us all the way to the sun with plenty to spare for sunscreen.”
Time for that old familiar tune: This war costs a bunch. Congress isn’t making it difficult for the Dubya Squad to get their hands on as much war making money as they’d like.
What are you doing to keep your money from Congress?
The White House said that it planned to ask Congress for an additional $70 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, driving the cost of military operations in the two countries to $120 billion this year, the highest .
Most of the new money would go to the war in Iraq, which already has cost an estimated $250 billion since the U.S. invasion in .
The additional spending, along with other war funds the Bush administration will seek separately in its regular budget next week, would push the price tag for combat and nation-building , to nearly half a trillion dollars — approaching the cost of the 13-year-long Vietnam War.
Congress has granted all previous administration requests for war funds, and this one is expected to be no different.
But budget analysts said the size of the newest request could make it more difficult for the Bush administration to get any new tax cuts through Congress this year.
The cost of military operations in is $35 billion higher than what Congress had estimated a few months ago the Defense Department would need this year.…
The rising costs contrast starkly with projections before the war.
Former White House economic advisor Lawrence B. Lindsey predicted in that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion, drawing administration ire for such a high estimate and eventually resigning his post.…
The $70 billion that the administration plans to seek would be added to $50 billion approved by Congress in as an advance on expenses, making this year the most expensive yet for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are tabulated together in federal legislation.
Congress has approved five emergency spending measures , and other federal funds have been moved into the effort to wage battle in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In all, more than $400 billion will have been set aside or spent by the end of this year.…
The administration also plans to seek a down payment on war costs and will include a request for $50 billion in its regular budget being presented to Congress on .
At TomDispatch, Mark Engler speculates that the “tipping point” at which the U.S. war in Iraq will unravel has more to do with money than with casualties.
Excerpts:
In the center of the CostOfWar.com home page, an upward-racing ticker, presented in a large, red font, keeps a steady tally of the money spent for the U.S. war in Iraq.…
As I write, the ticker reads $239,302,273,144.
…Even then, the incomprehensibly large number ticking away on screen turns out to be no measure at all of what we will eventually pay for the war.
Depending on what estimate you use, it could be off by almost a factor of ten.…
In the years since Baghdad fell, several analysts have sought better estimates for the war’s true cost.
In , Phyllis Bennis and Erik Leaver at the Institute for Policy Studies issued a paper predicting that the total cost could reach $700 billion at the then-current spending level of $5.6 billion per month.
Like the CostOfWar.com tally, this figure included only direct expenditures.
, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard’s Linda Bilmes released a report that took a wider view.
Hinting at the human cost of the occupation — which, of course, requires its own ghastly page in the ledger of wartime accounting — the report factored in the government-assigned “value of statistical life” for troops killed in combat.
(It did not include the loss of Iraqi lives.)
It tallied items such as the costs of health care for wounded veterans, increased recruitment spending for a hard-up Pentagon, and the opportunity costs of more productive public investments that might have been made if funds had not been diverted overseas.
Following Congressional Budget Office predictions for troop deployment, the report considers the possibilities of full U.S. withdrawal by .
All told, the two economists put the cost to the U.S. at between $1 trillion (their most “conservative” estimate) and $2.2 trillion (their “moderate” one).
Sixty billion, 239 billion, 2.2 trillion dollars.
The more such figures swirl, the more necessary it is to change the question.
The real matter at hand is not, “How much will it cost?” but, “When does it start to matter?”
The answers provided by past experience are imperfect.
The Oxford Companion to American Military History places the direct costs of the Vietnam War at $173 billion (equal to $770 billion in 2003 dollars).
Veterans benefits and interest payments add another trillion to Vietnam’s costs, calculated in 2003 dollars.
Thus, the estimates for the cost of the Iraq war already place the two conflicts at similar levels, although Vietnam expenditures represented a larger percentage of the Gross Domestic Product.
There seems to be no single point at which costs become too great.
Different parties reach their moment of decision at different times, independently determining that “victory” is not worth the price being paid.
Disaffection builds as financial and human costs rise.
And so looking at turning points, in Vietnam or in Iraq, involves twisting the question once again.
We must ask not only, “How costly is too costly?” But also, “Too costly for whom?”
…Bad news from the war front helped to turn the public, but domestic dissent went far in shaping public reactions to developments abroad.
The same polls that registered the first antiwar majority also showed that most Americans deplored the growing antiwar movement.
Nevertheless, antiwar protesters had a critical (and sometimes unexpected) impact.
Historian Melvin Small offers one example of when “the antiwar movement dramatically affected policy”:
After mass protests at the Pentagon in , “Lyndon Johnson launched a public relations campaign that emphasized how well the war was going.
When the Communists [then] launched their seemingly successful nationwide Tet Offensive most Americans felt that they had been deceived by their own government.”
A turn in elite opinion followed on the heels of public disaffection.
Although rarely remembered, the defection of a previously supportive business community formed an important part of this shift.
A lack of business enthusiasm for the war sprang from military developments in Vietnam, but was also spurred by war-related economic doldrums (which have resonance today).
As Small explains, “For many economists, the last truly good years for the economy were with almost full employment, very low inflation and a favorable balance of trade.”
As the war escalated, “an increasingly unfavorable balance of trade, related in part to spending for the war abroad, contributed to an international monetary crisis involving a threat to U.S. gold reserves in .
That threat helped convince some administration officials and Wall Street analysts that the United States could no longer afford the war.”
…In , [Clark] Clifford replaced Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense.
Although recruited as a hawk, he formed a new assessment of the war after examining the military realities and polling his well-heeled contacts to gauge the domestic outlook.
Historian Gabriel Kolko cites Clifford’s recollections from , when he told several White House aides, “I make it a practice to keep in touch with friends in business and the law across the land…
Until a few months ago, they were generally supportive of the war…
Now all that has changed.
These men now feel we are in a hopeless bog.”
He went on to say, “It would be very difficult — I believe it would be impossible — for the President to maintain public support for the war without the support of these men.”
, Clifford helped organize a two-day meeting between President Johnson and his Senior Advisory Group on Vietnam — nicknamed the “Wise Men.”
These were veteran operatives and diplomats with powerful connections to the business and financial communities.
As David Halberstam relates in The Best and the Brightest, they “quietly let [Johnson] know that the Establishment — yes, Wall Street — had turned on the war — It was hurting the economy, dividing the country, turning the youth against the country’s best traditions.”
As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard notes, just a few days later Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection and started the U.S. on its long exit from Vietnam.
…[P]ublic support for the Vietnam War never rebounded after .
Yet the conflict dragged on for another .
The ticker for that intervention kept racing higher because President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger were willing to take the tragedy Johnson made and adopt it as their own.
A lesson for us now is that no set pattern will guarantee a satisfying end to the situation we face, a situation in which another unpopular war threatens to stretch on for years.
The fact of the matter is that the majority of the country has already decided that the war in Iraq has become too costly.
Americans have rejected the prospect of funding a massive and prolonged occupation.
In that sense, we have already tipped.
Questions about the price of war keep resurfacing not because there’s a credible argument for most Americans that the price is reasonable, but because our elected officials thus far have only pushed those costs ever higher.
What remains, then, is for the public to hold accountable those who would carry forward the neoconservative crusade — to make their stance a costly one in public life.
What remains is for us bring the political price of war into line with the human and financial costs that we will continue to bear.
With the expected passage of the largest emergency spending bill in history, annual war expenditures in Iraq will have nearly doubled since the U.S. invasion, as the military confronts the rapidly escalating cost of repairing, rebuilding and replacing equipment chewed up by .
The cost of the war in U.S. fatalities has declined this year, but the cost in treasure continues to rise, from $48 billion in to $59 billion in to $81 billion in to an anticipated $94 billion in , according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The U.S. government is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion , a new Congressional Research Service report found.
Annual war costs in Iraq are easily outpacing the $61 billion a year that the United States spent in Vietnam , in today’s dollars.
One of my favorite liberals in blog land is Matthew Yglesias.
He has the patience to answer the comfortable idiot-“pragmatists” who want to keep plodding into the Big Muddy, and a pocket calculator that can say a thing or two about how much that’s gonna cost:
By , a Congressional Research Service (CRS) inquiry concluded that… before it ends, the war will likely cost somewhat more than the $549 billion spent (adjusted for inflation) in the much more lethal Vietnam War.
But even this figure will likely prove to be off by hundreds of billions of dollars because it accounts only for funds directly appropriated for war fighting.
As Linda Bilmes, a leading Harvard budgetary expert, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz point out in their paper, “The Economic Costs of the Iraq War,” the spending captured by the CRS, even in strict budgetary terms, is “only the tip of a very deep iceberg.”
Wartime appropriations do not, for example, include the cost of disability payments to veterans wounded in the war, payments that will continue throughout their life spans.
Nor do they cover the costs of medical treatment for those seriously injured in the war, or even such basic war-related costs as the replacement of equipment and munitions expended in the conflict or the need to transport soldiers back to their home bases when they rotate out of country.
The war has also substantially increased the military’s overall recruiting costs, reflected in bigger bonuses and additional recruiters.
What’s more, by combining the war with aggressive tax cutting, the administration has ensured that the operation is paid for entirely by borrowing money on which interest will need to be paid.
The shocking truth, according to Bilmes and Stiglitz, is that if one applies the Congressional Budget Office’s basic assumptions about the duration of the conflict (“a small but continuous presence”), it will cost nearly a staggering $1.27 trillion dollars before all is said and done.
The number is so high as to defy human comprehension.
All the numbers ending in “-illion” sound the same.
But a trillion is what you get if you spend a million dollars a day … for a million days.
That’s 2,737 years — a cool mil a day, every day, in other words, until the Year of Our Lord 4743.
Or, working backward, from the time when Homer wrote the Iliad up to now.
The $270 billion in rounding error is worth another 750 years at the million-a-day rate.
That takes us up to the year 5493 — or back to when Moses fled Egypt.
More of what your taxes pay for: gargantuan bribes to convince member states of the United Nations Security Council to vote the way our government wants them to:
Each year, Washington goes through the masquerade of writing up a budget and forgetting to include money to keep the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan funded.
Then they pass a supplemental “emergency” funding bill later on.
In , at the start of the Korean War, supplemental appropriations comprised almost three quarters of all appropriations.
By , supplementals were under 3 percent.
By of the Korean War, supplementals were down to zero.
In , the first year of the escalation in Vietnam, supplemental appropriations were seven times as high as regular appropriations.
, they were roughly equal.
In supplementals were less than a fifth of regular appropriations, and by they were down to zero.
The request will hit the new, Democrat-controlled Congress, which is expected to greet it with flowers as if it were an invasion of foreign troops, a move which we can expect to frustrate, but not educate, anti-war liberals.
War costs are up for American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — way up, more than a third higher than last year.
In the first half of this fiscal year, the Defense Department’s “average monthly obligations for contracts and pay is running about $12 billion per month, well above the $8.7 billion in ,” says a new report, obtained by Danger Room, from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.
Some short bits from recent days:
The site My War Tax purports to calculate how much you, personally, are paying for the Iraq War.
You type in your taxable income for , and the site calculates your bill for you (and lets you know how it made the calculation so you can see if it makes sense to you).
Kat Kanning wrote up the story of the civil disobedience actions that she, her husband Russell, Dave Ridley, and Lauren Canario have been doing at the IRS offices in Keene, New Hampshire, for the Keene Free Press.
NH Insider also did a story on the Dave Ridley case.
And if you’re tired of reading, you can watch an action-in-progress on YouTube.
As Kat Kanning’s article noted, this action was organized and enacted in less than twenty-four hours, and ten local activists attended on short notice.
The U.S. Congress is toying with the idea of shutting down the recently-adopted IRS practice of using private debt collection agencies to hunt down people who don’t pay taxes.
At a hearing, one Representative played a tape of one such private debt collection agency harassing its prey over the phone (here’s a PDF transcript).
The IRS is still having a hell of a time bringing its database into the 21st century. The latest TIGTA audit of the project found that the “pattern of deferring Project requirements to later releases and missing release deployment dates has continued” with yet another over-budget missed deadline and with requirements radically scaled-back at the last minute (some of these requirements have been deferred for over five years now).
The war in Iraq could ultimately cost well over a trillion dollars — at least double what has already been spent — including the long-term costs of replacing damaged equipment, caring for wounded troops, and aiding the Iraqi government, according to a new government analysis.
The United States has already allocated more than $500 billion on the day-to-day combat operations of what are now 190,000 troops and a variety of reconstruction efforts.
In a report to lawmakers yesterday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that even under the rosiest scenario — an immediate and substantial reduction of troops — American taxpayers will feel the financial consequences of the war for at least a decade.
The calculations include the estimated cost to leave some US forces behind for at least several years to support the Iraqi government, but they also predict other long-term costs, such as extended medical care and disability compensation for wounded soldiers and survivor’s benefits for the families of the thousands of combat-zone fatalities.
The cost of the war in Iraq and other military operations has soared to the point where “we are now spending on these activities more than 10 percent of all the government’s annually appropriated funds,” said Robert A. Sunshine, the budget office’s assistant director for budget analysis.
Proclaiming that one day of the Iraq War costs $720 million, or $500,000 a minute, the Quaker pacifist group American Friends Service Committee is taking the money-focused message to a dozen U.S. cities in a series of seven-foot (more-than-one-metre) banners.
The banners stress what could be bought with the war dollars: one banner says that the tax funds spent in Iraq each day could pay for 84 new elementary schools, while another says it could pay for health care for more than 163,000 people.
These messages will harmonize well with an upcoming war tax resistance campaign that’s designed to get thousands of Americans to resist the portion of their taxes that pays for war in the Middle-East and redirect it to better causes.
(I’ll share more details on this project as it starts to go public.)
Military spending took a jump this year and now, according to the League’s analysis, takes up 54% of what the government spends your income tax dollar on.
And don’t expect that figure to drop much any time soon:
In , the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the [Iraq] war had so far cost about $500 billion.
That figure was obviously far higher than initial Bush administration estimates, but [Joseph] Stiglitz and [Linda] Bilmes suspected it was still much too low.
After researching the issue, they published a paper in that conservatively estimated that the true cost of the war would be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion.
Even at the time, they regarded that estimate as excessively conservative, but didn’t want to appear extreme.
Stiglitz and Bilmes’ [new] book, which is based on that paper, doubles their earlier estimates to $3 trillion, making Iraq the second most expensive war in U.S. history, trailing only World War Ⅱ, which cost an adjusted $5 trillion (and in which 16.3 million Americans served in the armed forces, with 400,000 dying).
But the authors regard even their new figure as conservative:
Their estimates range from $2 trillion, in the best-case scenario in which the U.S. withdraws all combat troops and fewer veterans need medical and disability pay, to more than $5 trillion.
Add in the cost to the rest of the world, and the price tag could exceed $6 trillion.
As the authors detail, the Bush administration has used every trick in the book to hide the real price tag — concealing non-combat casualty figures, keeping double sets of books, not factoring in support troops, and allowing the Pentagon to produce budgets so contradictory, obscure and incompetently presented that there is literally no way to determine how much it has spent.
The authors had to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain much of the information in their book.
But the administration’s biggest sleight of hand has been ignoring the enormous future costs of caring for the hundreds of thousands of disabled veterans who will require vast medical and disability payments, many for the rest of their lives.
Those costs will be staggering: an estimated $717 billion.
Relatively little attention is paid to those costs, because they haven’t shown up on the books yet.
But as the authors point out in one of the book’s more arresting statistics, they’re coming:
We’re already paying $4.3 billion a year to the veterans of the first Gulf War, which lasted less than two months and in which only 148 U.S. soldiers were killed.
…the monthly “burn rate” to pay for the wars has gone steadily up, from $4.4 billion in to $16 billion .
This means that every American household is spending $138 a month on the current operating expenses of the wars.
Reason magazine’s cover story is all about the huge financial cost of the United States’ wars, and how the government is using unprecedented accounting chicanery to hide the cost from the taxpayers who will be paying it.
At Dogpatch, Ergo Sum, Gerald DePyper has been posting aseriesof articles promoting a tax strike in the anti-abortion movement.
An audit of the IRS by TIGTA found that the agency doesn’t always follow its own rules for notifying people that liens have been filed against them.
in the United States, and all across the country people were scrambling to get to the post office in time to have their tax returns postmarked by the deadline.
There to meet them were tax resisters:
The Ryder Report has video of the protest in Keene, New Hampshire, including feedback from passers-by.
In Brattleboro, Vermont, war tax resisters including Bob Bady and Daniel Sicken redirected their taxes to local charities:
Kevin Flaherty, a postal employee who ducked out in the afternoon for a smoke break, said it was encouraging to see the war tax resisters give away their money.
“It’s great,” he said, pointing out that it was Kevin Flaherty the citizen — not Kevin Flaherty the postal worker — who was supporting the group.
“Sometimes when people are paying their taxes, I joke that somebody has to pay for the Iraq War.
Maybe this will make them pay attention.”
Tax resisters in New York City handed out War Resisters League budget pie charts at the midtown post office.
Joshua Klein of Nashua, New Hampshire filed his tax returns , but decided to include a protest letter instead of a check.
“Klein would not reveal how much he owed but said he’s donating the money to America’s Second Harvest, the largest domestic hunger-relief organization in the country, and the American Civil Liberties Union, although he’s not affiliated with either group.”
In Los Alamos, New Mexico, two protesters were arrested for trespassing during a vigil at the Los Alamos National Laboratories.
The protesters said they were there “to prayerfully encourage the nonviolent, safe, clean disarmament of weapons of mass destruction, along with the clean-up of LANL… [and] to visibly celebrate the war-tax boycott organized by the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.”
War tax resisters in Bangor, Maine, including Larry Dansinger, protested at the post office and gave away redirected taxes.
One of the grants was a scholarship to a student who, because he has refused to register with the selective service system (for the military draft), will be ineligible to apply for college financial aid.
The Home News Tribune of New Jersey has a video report of the war tax protest at the post office there.
In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, peace activists held a “penny poll” in which they asked passers-by how they would prioritize the nation’s budget.
Meanwhile, constitutionalist tax protesters handed out documentaries and documentation about their theories.
In Berkeley, California, Code Pink was out with their “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” banner.
Free Speech Radio News covered national protests over war taxes, government spending priorities, and the Capitol Hill press conference.
Along with the news coverage, bloggers commemorated with more personal commentary:
At The Begging Bowl, Jake writes about his tax resistance: “The money I would have paid the government has gone to the Chicago Anti-Hunger Foundation.
When votes no longer matter we vote with our dollars.
I vote for the works of mercy and feeding the hungry.
And if it means the IRS is gonna come knocking on my door for $119, I will offer them some food too.
And if they ask for a check, I’ll go with them to jail.
That’s another work of mercy, visit the imprisoned.
If we took the works of mercy as seriously as we took our 1040s and economic stimulus package, the Kingdom of God would be at hand.”
J.D. Tuccille, at Disloyal Opposition, gives a thumbs up for tax resisters — “whatever their reasons, I think it’s worth saluting folks who go out of the way to avoiding feeding the beast.”
Kerrie, at State & Local Politics, reacts to news coverage of the Schwieberts: “It takes a whole lot of nerve to do what his couple is doing.
But I wonder if Bush would take notice and stop the war if more people took this route to protest the war?
I know that we have to do something because things are getting worse not better.”
Will Shetterly, at It’s All One Thing, discusses tax resistance, and includes some inspirational quotes from tax resisters.
Today, some bits-and-pieces that have collected over the past weeks that I haven’t been able to fit in anywhere else:
A site calling itself The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree brings the war tax resister “penny poll” into the digital age: asking people to fill a shopping cart with things they’d rather have bought than the Iraq War for that $3,000,000,000,000.
The Tax Foundation notes that while we’re distracted complaining about the windfall profits of ExxonMobil and the like, the real bandits are getting off skot free: “the total amount of taxes the company paid or remitted [last quarter was] $29.3 billion, nearly three times the net profits it earned for shareholders. The financial statements of two other large U.S.-based oil companies, ConocoPhillips and ChevronTexaco, show similar large tax payments. Indeed, these three companies paid or remitted a combined $47.8 billion in taxes in the first quarter of , nearly $28 billion more than they earned in net profits.”
Mimi Copp says that the Iraq War has cost American families about $16,500 each. But she’s decided to stop payment. “It is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. But this year, with a core group of people in my church community, Circle of Hope, I was able to walk with them through the discernment process and I felt quite strongly about doing this form of resistance to war-making, while at the same time redirecting money to life-giving initiatives. Here’s a letter to the editor I wrote for tax day, which was not published.”:
How can we stop the war in Iraq? Soldiers can refuse to fight. Government
leaders can de-fund the occupation. Taxpayers can stop paying for it.
This year I will not pay my federal income tax to the
U.S. government.
I will no longer support my country’s war-making by giving it my money.
In , out of every dollar the
U.S. government
spent, 5 cents was spent on education and 12 cents on food and housing
assistance, while it spent 41 cents on war & preparations for war. This
type of spending does not reflect my Christian values and therefore I will
not support it.
Instead, I will redirect my tax dollars to two organizations working on
life-giving initiatives: healthcare for the uninsured and aid for Iraqi
refugees.
When Congress passes the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill
(HR-1921), I
will resume paying my income tax to the
U.S. government.
I know that I will be breaking the law and I am prepared to accept the
consequences, because when a country wages war there are consequences; ask a
solider returning home or an Iraqi refugee being resettled in Philadelphia.
The MakingPeace blog reports on another variation of the “penny poll”-style war tax protest. It’s pretty simple: just pieces of paper on which are printed “I’d rather buy _______ than war!”, accompanied with magic markers aplenty.
Everybody in the willfully ineffective wing of the American anti-war movement is going to Cleveland for an Open National Conference to Stop the War in Iraq and Bring the Troops Home Now. They seem to have concluded, before the conference even begins, that the most important thing they can be doing right now is to organize another big march and rally like the ones that have been so effective in the past.
The Urban Institute has published a paper on War and Taxes to note that the Iraq War seems to be an anomaly in that the U.S. government is spending hand over fist on the war, but not trying to raise revenue accordingly.
And, oh yeah, ho hum, but much of that taxpayer money being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan is being spent stupidly.
That article highlights in particular a $30 million dining facility at a U.S. base in Iraq that the U.S. has promised to abandon within a couple of years.
It was supposed to replace a more run-down facility that, nonetheless, was completely renovated for $3.36 million and is now perfectly fine.
Having discovered this $30 million waste, nobody is doing anything about it, since the project is too far along and the contractors will get paid at this point whether or not they build it.
Maybe that’s where your taxes went. Who knows?
Wouldn’t it be nice if they’d inscribe your name in a plaque in the lobby?
has come and gone, and with it the TEA Parties and protests.
Some items of note:
The National Priorities Project has long been maintaining a Cost of War counter that keeps track of the monetary cost of the major wars the United States is pursuing at the moment, and allows you to see how much your community has spent on these wars.
Recently, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, approved the installation of a large, digital “cost of war” counter in front of City Hall.
Pam Allee explains her war tax resistance at Portland Independent Media Center: “your vote on April 15th is the permission Congress needs to continue ‘business as usual.’ ”
She and other anti-war folks were also protesting taxes, only because tax dollars are used to support war.
Kathy lives at a subsistence level to avoid paying taxes.
“I can’t imagine changing my life so I can contribute to the devastation of war,” she told me.
In addition, she observed that because of her commitment to living at a subsistence level, she can’t own a car and she consumes very little fossil fuels, just helping to save the planet.
“The IRS is my spiritual director,” she argued.
Now that’s not something you hear every April 15.
Amy Goodman notes that all of the state government budget deficit problems that are causing such hand-wringing anguish amongst pundits and government employees could easily be solved just by bringing home the U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and keeping the money we spend to keep them there at home.
Drug warriors publish reports touting their successes that have all of the charm and veracity of Mao-era reports on the latest record-breaking grain harvests.
We’re driving cocaine production down, say one set of reports.
We’re seizing more cocaine than ever, say another.
A group of skeptical reporters in Italy took a look at the numbers and realized that this year, the trend lines crossed, and the drug warriors expect to be so successful that they’ll seize fully 103% of the cocaine produced worldwide this year.
Remember when the divided Congress was teasing us with the possibility of a “government shutdown?”
Heh.
We should be so lucky.
Thomas Knapp of the Center for a Stateless Society gives us the low-down on Government Shutdown Theater.
Excerpts:
When the organs of of American government come to loggerheads on the federal budget, a temporary shutdown of “non-essential services” ensues until one side caves.
Oh, no, Br’er Bear!
Please don’t throw me in the briar patch!
Unfortunately, the compromises usually come fairly quickly.
Government shutdowns generally go a few days.
The record is three weeks.
We’ve seen 15 of these shutdowns since the Carter administration, which should tell us something about how non-traumatic they really are.
So what, pray tell, is the distinction between “essential” and “non-essential?”
Here’s an easy way to tell: If the shutdown of a service irritates and inconveniences ordinary people, but doesn’t really reduce the power of politicians, that service is “non-essential.”
If shutting down a service would actually reduce government’s control over your life, it’s “essential.”
[For example] During a shutdown you can’t get a passport from the government.
Your ability to travel is “non-essential.”
If you show up at the border, though, there will still be a customs official waiting there, demanding to see said passport.
The government’s ability to control your travel is “essential.”
A site called “Rethink Afghanistan” is featuring a cost-of-war calculator that purports to tell the American taxpayer how much he or she paid to keep the U.S. fighting there.
The group is not advocating war tax resistance, but merely using the cost of war as a pragmatic prompting for additional outrage:
Many of us are about to write checks to the IRS, and we’re about to do it at a time when, frankly, we don’t have a lot of money to spare.
That’s why it’s important that we take a good, hard look at where our dollars are going and make sure our elected officials hear from us when they make bad decisions that waste scare resources.
Anything that helps connect in the minds of taxpayers the money they pay and the consequences of the resulting spending is a good thing, and I like to think that the anti-war activists who came up with this campaign (and those who find it persuasive) might be receptive to a war tax resistance message.
Meanwhile, some folks from the Global Day of Action on Military Spending went on to the campus of American University and asked some students there to fill out a blank pie chart with their best guess as to what percentage of the federal discretionary budget goes to various budget categories.
Most people know that the U.S. government spends a lot on its military, but even so they can be shocked when they see just how much, and how it crowds out other spending that they prefer:
Edward Gresser, of Progressive Economy, takes a look at U.S. tariffs on imported goods and hopes for a rebirth of progressive free-trade populism, noting that these tariffs are “America’s most regressive tax”:
imported leather dress shoes are taxed at 8.5% while cheap sneakers are taxed at 48%; fancy cashmere sweaters are taxed at 4% while their acrylic cousins are taxed at 32%; and the same down the line for shirts, bras, handbags, bedware, dinnerware, jewelry, etc. — luxury items have tiny tariffs, while inexpensive mass-market items are hit with huge rates. These tariffs raised about $26 billion for the U.S. government last year.
This seems like an area where the Grover Norquist anti-tax conservatives, the aid-the-poor progressives, and the free-trade libertarians could and should come together.
Speaking of free trade, here’s another reason why you can’t trust governments to bring it about.
Check out this crazy story:
The U.S. props up its cotton industry with subsidies.
Brazil complained that this violates international free trade agreements.
So the World Trade Organization ruled that the U.S. must stop these subsidies.
The U.S. refused.
So the WTO said Brazil was entitled to penalize the U.S. by disregarding U.S. intellectual property rights (in other words, they could pirate or duplicate things that were copyrighted or patented by U.S. people or companies without penalty).
Did this make the U.S. back down?
Not quite.
Instead of ending subsidies to U.S. cotton, the U.S. government decided to extend these subsidies to Brazilian cotton manufacturers to mollify the Brazilians!
So American taxpayers are paying Brazilian cotton manufacturers so that American politicians don’t have to cut off illegal subsidies to American cotton manufacturers.
In other news…
Enric Durán reflects on the crisis in Catalonia, and how decentralized autonomous cooperatives are an alternative to independent states when considering models of rebellion against control by the Spanish government, in El Temps.
Excerpt:
[We] seek autonomy. We do not seek control of the territory in which we live.
We seek to be free in our direct actions.
Therefore, we build our parallel system of fees and taxes and make fiscal disobedience to the state, to any state.
With these resources, we manage alternatives.
We protect our activity even if it is not legally recognized or is disobedient to the State.
In this way, we exercise the right to community self-determination.
We do not recognize state sovereignty over our community actions.
It means that we first recognize the decisions of our assemblies before any law — collective decisions that are open and have nothing to hide.
We look for ways to not pay taxes and the added revenues derived from this we use for our community.
Anyone can join these openly by participating in a local cooperative or group.
Durán is currently championing a new bitcoin-like alternative currency called “Faircoin”, with the explicit goal of making transactions less taxable and less subject to the demands of the official banking system.
Newly released figures from the Pentagon say that the government of the United States has spent $250,000,000 every day for on its Terror War.
That doesn’t include what’s being spent by off-the-books secret agencies (where Congress hides a lot of Terror War spending), and it also doesn’t count veterans’ benefits (currently $46,000,000 per day for Terror War vets).
The heartening human rebellion against traffic ticket issuing robots continues.
In recent weeks, speed cameras have been disabled by human rebels in Canada, Italy, and France, yet more in England, Italy, France, Canada, and Belgium, and several more in France, where, in spite of the hundreds of speed cameras destroyed and the government’s warning that this would make the roads more dangerous, traffic fatalities have fallen during the rebellion.
A “men’s magazine” I’d never heard of before called MEL has published “The Case for an American Tax Strike” with the delightful subhead: “Nice oligarchy you’ve got there. Be a shame if we quit paying for it…”
The Democratic Republic of the Congo doesn’t make it into my news feed very often for other reasons, but the provinces of North and South Kivu seem to throw tax strikes every other week.
The tactic seems to be well-established there as a way for the people to regulate and check the political power of the government.
In the latest example, residents of the city of Kamituga met and decided to refuse to pay taxes until the government repairs the road that connects that city to the rest of the province.
They have been joined by Baraka and Fizi.
Latest estimates from the Cost of Wars project put the price tag of the War on Iraq to U.S. taxpayers at some $2,000,000,000,000 so far, “roughly $8,000 per U.S. taxpayer, representing 9 percent of the national debt.”
Each year, Washington goes through the masquerade of writing up a budget and forgetting to include money to keep the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan funded.
Then they pass a supplemental “emergency” funding bill later on.
