April,
the month tax filings are due, prompts us to
ponder what our income taxes pay for. Are they
used to provide all citizens sufficient
resources and public goods for human security
and well-being – the core of our national
security?
How
much of our taxes pay for radically reducing
climate change emissions and protection of
nature; for equal quality education for all;
for providing health care for all; for housing
the poor and homeless and eliminating hunger;
for safe bridges, roads and rail and adequate
public transportation; for prioritizing
diplomacy and peace in the world so as to
avert war and reverse our decline of
democracy? Aren’t these our deepest security
guarantees?
Reviewing
the federal discretionary budget for the year
2022, here is a snapshot of our government’s
values:
For
every $100 spent on the Pentagon, for war,
weapons, counterterrorism, military personnel,
and nearly 800 military bases in 80 countries
on six continents, an estimated
· $2
is spent on Food and Agriculture;
· $6
is spent on Transportation;
· $6
is spent on International Affairs, a fraction
of which includes Diplomacy;
· $8
is spent on Energy and Environment;
· $10
is spent on Health;
· $14
is spent on Education;
· $14
is spent on Housing and Community.
Would
you call this budget moral?
Consider
these facts.
In
March of this year, nearly 30 million poor
people had their food
assistance benefits severely
reduced, while inflationary food prices have
grown by 10%.
Fifty-two
percent of
children under the age of 18 in the U.S. today
are poor or low-income; and the majority of
our country’s poor are women
and children.
Between 40
and 50% of
people report having difficulty paying for a
$400 medical emergency expense; 8% have
no health insurance
Adult
literacy in the U.S., at 79%,
falls below many countries, including Cuba and
Azerbaijan, each near 100% literacy. Among the
78 nations that measure 15-year-old students’
academic performance in math, reading and
science, the most recent 2018 PISA
results show
that the United States ranks lower than many
countries.
America’s
wars on drugs, crime, terrorism and “illegal”
immigrants – along with our decades-long
military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan –
have created a weapons-saturated politics of
policing, border control and mass
incarceration. To date, the US has spent
over $1.6
billion on
the militarization of police with hand-me-down
military-grade weapons, vehicles, and
equipment. Research “suggests that officers
with military hardware and mindsets will resort
to violence more
quickly and often."
The
climate crisis has receded to a low-priority,
almost nonexistent background since the war in
Ukraine, while this war and the reconstruction
of Ukraine post-war add immense fuel emissions
to an already deeply endangered world: a world
that climate
scientists see
as hurtling toward catastrophe. War is a climate
killer,
and the Pentagon is the largest institutional
climate criminal in the world.
Regarding
diplomacy as a priority to avert war, US and
Russian officials met on March 2, 2023 for
the first
time since
the start of the war in Ukraine in February
2022, for
less than 10 minutes.
During this same period, the U.S. has given
some $47
billion in
military aid to Ukraine. With its scrawny and
starved diplomacy, our government has no
interest in negotiating an end to the brutal
war in Ukraine, stating openly it wants to
“weaken Russia.” Simultaneously, the U.S.
threatens war against China, threats that
began a few years ago against our largest
economic competitor and have only grown and
militarized. As millions of people are
increasingly traumatized from intensifying
climate emergencies, our government has
insanely enlisted alliances with NATO, Japan,
South Korea and Australia to prepare for war
against China.
No
one benefits more from wars than salivating
arms dealers who have shrewdly located
facilities in every state and not surprisingly
won inflation
relief in
2022 from Congress.
How
our government coddles its arms dealers, which
account for a record 40% of
the world's weapons exports in the years
2018-22! The State
Department negotiates
these weapons sales to more than 100
countries, while sparing only 10 minutes to
meet with Russia over the war in Ukraine. No
surprise that our hyper-militarized government
ranks 129th out
of 163 countries in the 2022 Global Peace
Index,
Maybe,
just maybe, had we a parallel Department of
Peace, empowered and funded equally with the
original Department of War–as a signer of
the Declaration of Independence proposed–we
might have halved the 392 military
interventions engaged in since 1776 and
excelled in diplomacy and peace negotiations
as much as we do in waging war. “Peace,
not war, is the norm of human life,” proclaims
the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement. Why cannot
our federal government and its budget
internalize this wisdom?
This
commentary is also published by LA
Progressive
