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 → public opinion concerning

Here’s some good-news-bad-news for the war tax resistance set. One of the stunts we like to pull during our April 15^th Tax Day protests is to have a budget simulator — usually a set of labeled slots into which passers-by can put a number of pennies to show what their spending priorities would be. The slots are labeled “Defense,” and “Education,” and so forth.

Predictably, the priorities of those who attend or humor war tax resistance demonstrations are different from the priorities of those who actually decide how to spend our tax dollars. Most obviously, the defense budget dives down to a level more like that of other nations, and feel-good programs to educate kids, cure disease, and uplift the as-yet-unlifted get a big boost.

Now, the Program on International Policy Attitudes has done a more rigorous version of the same idea — polling a random nationwide sample of 1,182 Americans about their budget priorities:

As you may know, the White House proposes a budget to Congress. In this survey, you will make up a budget for 17 major areas of the budget. We’re not including some big entitlement programs like Medicare or Social Security, which by law cannot simply be adjusted year to year. For these 17 areas, a budget of about $912 billion has been proposed for 2006. Please imagine that you have $1,000 of your tax money to divide among these 17 areas. For each area, you’ll see how much of your $1,000 is proposed to go to that area, and then you can indicate how many dollars you’d like to see go to that area. You’ll be able to monitor how much of the $1,000 you have left as you make decisions by scrolling down to the bottom of the page.

The results? Steep cuts to the Defense Department, to the war budget, and to the Justice Department. Big increases in spending on such things as UN “peacekeeping,” job training programs, energy independence, education, medical research, veterans’ benefits and deficit reduction.

Question #25 on the survey asked: “Imagine that the President and Congress decided to cut defense spending by 15% and directed this money to education, healthcare, housing, and cutting the deficit instead. Would you: Support this decision [65% said yes], Oppose this decision [31%]…”

So why did I say this was good-news-bad-news for the liberal war tax resistance set? The survey shows that a random sample of Americans, Republicans and Democrats and “Others,” red state and blue state, agree that the military budget should be cut dramatically and that money used in more sensible ways. Sounds like an unambiguous popular affirmation of the liberal war tax resisters’ core position.

But Kevin Drum, at Political Animal says that people’s preferences in a survey like this don’t mean much at election time:

People say this kind of stuff to pollsters all the time (and Democrats usually rejoice at the results), but when election day comes around they flatly don’t vote based on these priorities. If John Kerry had proposed cutting the defense budget by $150 billion he wouldn’t have lost the election by 3 percentage points, he would have lost by 10 or 20.

I don’t know quite why these polls always turn out this way, but I suspect they do a lot of harm to liberals, who continue to read them as vindication that Americans really do support liberal issues. There’s some truth to that, but the fact is that most liberal issues aren’t salient election causes and we haven’t succeeded in making them so. Anyone who disagrees should recommend cutting the defense budget by 25% and reallocating the money to education and job training. The very same people who responded to PIPA’s poll will then cheerfully vote you out of office in a huge landslide.

On 1–4 February 2007, the Gallup polling organization asked a representative sample of US citizens if they thought the United States was spending too little, too much, or just the right amount on defense and the military. For the first time since the mid-1990s, a plurality of Americans said that the country was spending too much.…

So lately I’ve been being very urban homesteader — baking bread, brewing beer and sake, making yogurt, weeding the garden, canning soups. I’ve been looking for a paying gig, too, which I think partially explains my sudden explosion of home usefulness: it gives me something productive to do while I wait for résumés and bids to be ignored.

What I haven’t been doing much is writing anything substantial for The Picket Line. Sorry ’bout that.

Meanwhile all sorts of interesting things have backed up in my bookmarks, waiting for me to add some insight or context before passing them on for you to enjoy. I think instead I’ll just let them spill out here and trust you to fill in the blanks:

• Francois Tremblay wonders if taxpayers become complicit in what their tax dollars support. He weighs the arguments for both sides (no, because their participation is legally required; and yes, because their participation is nonetheless voluntary) and then engages in some spirited give-and-take with his readers.
• Steven Schallert writes about his war tax resistance at his interestingly-titled blog shutters slide to unveil fingerprints of angels.
• War tax resisters Phil and Louise Baldwin Rieman died in a car accident shortly after Christmas last year. There have been several remembrances of the couple on-line, such as this one from the Church of the Brethren.
• Murray Rothbard writes about ending tyranny without violence (through withdrawal of consent) and the nearly 500-year-old insights of Étienne de La Boétie.
• Carl Watner takes a fresh look at the Whiskey Rebellion and what it means about the origin and nature of the U.S. government.
• Gene Healy and Benjamin Friedman of the Cato Institute note that the U.S. military is preparing a new occupation, and when they meet the enemy the enemy will be us.
• The Taxpayer Advocate said in its annual report that American taxpayers pay — above and beyond what they actually are charged in taxes — nearly two hundred billion dollars just trying to do the paperwork involved in taxpaying.
• Our local paper did the math and put a number on a conclusion that should have been pretty obvious: it’s much cheaper to take public transit than to drive. According to their figures, it costs Bay Area drivers about $1,000 per month to get where they’re going by car instead of by bus and rail. Hell, we pay that much for rent.
• There seems to be a lot of buzz about a revival of local, alternative currencies during this recession.
• A writer for Rebelión notes that Europe’s public is sick of spending so much on the military and asks, “is tax resistance not therefore justified, an investment in the struggle for what is worth the trouble of defending instead of the military costs that impede this to a great extent?” (en español)
• Finally, U.S. nuclear weapons spending topped $52 billion last year (and that’s only counting what we’re allowed to know about). Compare that to the budget of your favorite government agency, business, or non-profit.

Some tidbits that have caught my eye lately:

• The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research has done us a service by gathering together decades of American opinion surveys about taxes conducted by multiple polling organizations and putting all the numbers in a single, hundred-page PDF.
• Darian Worden has a sensible piece at the Center for a Stateless Society on how to Build Liberty From the Ground Up. “If you want to be effective at increasing freedom,” says Worden, “your daily activity should be consistent with the principles of individual liberty.”
• “Rad Geek” has some thought-provoking things to say about “thick” versus “thin” libertarianism, as does John Holbo at Crooked Timber.
• And here’s a heartwarming cartoon.

One of the bugbears in the debate over military spending is the idea that such spending represents some sort of Keynesian miracle drug that boosts the economy. The classic argument is that the massive explosion of military spending by the United States during World War Ⅱ pulled the country out of the Great Depression.

David Henderson asks, well, then, how do you explain the great post-war economic boom when the U.S. government cut spending by 75%, largely military spending? What happened was an economic boom that even comfortably absorbed all of the workers who were shed from the military and from war industries.

There are lots of bad reasons to spend zillions on armaments and overseas bases, but don’t let anyone try to sell you on the idea that it’s some sort of economic panacæa.