or, whither our priorities
A friend shared the text/graphic at right on her Facebook timeline, and I had to agree--IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE.
The same national leadership yelling loudest about illegal immigration and foreign aid are the same ones blocking veteran benefits, fighting against more funding for wider health care and prescription drug coverage for seniors, demonizing the hungry in our own country, and on and on.
Their goal is to have the rich pay less per capita than the poor in taxes and distracting the public by making issues like illegal immigration and federal foreign aid the scapegoats for why these other things aren't being funded. (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.)
$1 TRILLION in revenue has been LOST to the Bush tax cuts on the top 5% of earners between 2001 and 2011. Most of that trillion dollars (seven-tenths) comes from the top 1% of income earners, who make more than $1 million a year. Those lost revenues (given away as two wars began) would wipe out the 2012 budget deficit almost dollar for dollar.
Why aren't we able to outfit our men and women in uniform properly? F-22 Raptor fighter jets cost $150,000,000 each to make (with development costs included, the number swells to $350 million).
Twelve new planes = fully equipping between 100,000 and 240,000 soldiers for a year.
This year, a secret hold was put on a 1.9% cost-of-living increase in disability benefits for veterans and surviving spouses proposal in the Senate by an unnamed Republican. That extra $500 per year per veteran ($686 million total in fiscal 2013) equates to four F-22s that the military doesn't even want. (That COLA increase was finally passed and signed into law last week).
In 2009, Air Force leaders had already said they didn't want any more F-22s because of the plane's limited air-to-ground capabilities needed for today's battlefields. While the whole Congress opted to end production of F-22 Raptor fighter jets, the House Armed Services committee stripped money from another program budgeted for 2010 to order 12 new F-22s. That the Air Force DIDN'T WANT. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said during his campaign that he "would also add F-22s to our air force fleet," after F-22 production finally ended this year.
Curious about where that federal foreign aid (1.5% of the federal budget) goes?
In 2010, the total budgeted amount of federal foreign assistance was $38 billion. The top 5 recipients in order were
Those 5 accounted for more than half of the total help that the US offers the entire world. Two of those top 5 - Afghanistan and Iraq - need our help because our military sorties there have obliterated their infrastructures. Pakistan is being assisted for its
The federal tax/cost deficit created by undocumented households (yes, undocumented workers *do* contribute to federal coffers) was $29 billion for 2011. That equates to 1/10th of 1% of the federal budget in 2011.
By comparison, we spend $52 billion - almost twice that tax/cost deficit - on maintaining the US nuclear weapons program. Estimates put costs at $352 billion minimum over the coming decade to operate and modernize the current US arsenal.
Bonus fun facts:
The average nuclear weapon in the US arsenal is approximately eight times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, immediately killing some 90,000 people.
At a count of 5,113, we have as many operational* nuclear warheads as the rest of the world COMBINED. When stockpiles and warheads in queue for disarmament are included, the number is something like 19,000).
