Here's the thing about the government: It doesn't earn its own money. It gets its money from us, through taxes.
That's fine and righteous because we live in a society together and we want safety nets and libraries and parks and community colleges and free vaccination programs and dental clinics.
It feels less fine and righteous when our elected "representatives" apportion that governmental money collected through taxes in ways that do not align with our values and beliefs.
This is a big topic. We could talk about the $700 billion in taxpayer hard-earned that bailed out the too-big-to-fail banks in 2008 after the economic crash—while those banks paid CEOs and other top dogs fat bonuses and regular homeowners lost their houses to foreclosure. We could also talk about when Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the utility company that supplies much of California with its power, declared bankruptcy for the first time, about 16 years ago. The deal struck by the utility giant included a grifty taxpayer bailout, as well as an arrangement where PG&E was supposed to turn over ownership of about 140,000 acres of forests and wetlands to conservation groups. More than 15 years after the deal, PG&E retains ownership to over 70% of those lands. Maybe we should take back 70% of the taxpayer dollars that bailed them out? We could buy a lot of different colors of nail polish with all that dough.
But those are stories for another day. Today, I'd like to focus on our country's military spending.
I carry in my mind a certain pie chart from a book—Addicted To War--that a couple of my sons read when they were younger. Because I've been thinking about this stuff recently, I pulled the book off the shelf, and there on page one, was the simple, circle-shaped graphic, showing the United States' federal discretionary budget divided into two chunks: military spending accounted for 51%; everything else, 49%.
Our edition of Addicted To War was published in 2005, and while I know our country's military budget is overweight, I wasn't able to verify those exact proportions. I did find a more detailed, more recent pie chart from the War Resisters League (WRL), an organization I love and trust. The WRL pie chart shows the U.S. spending, for fiscal year 2021, 47% on the military, 53% for everything else.
The point is: A lot of moolah goes to our defense budget every year. (Surely some of that money could be going to other things, no?) This includes veterans' benefits, which we owe and must honor, but also hundreds of billions of $$ for procurement, research and development, and construction, among other things.
On Barack Obama's watch, we greatly expanded our military presence around the world, sowing mayhem and misery in multiple locations. The cost for all that was high in many ways, including the It-cost-a-lot-of-money-to-do-that way. Obama passed off more active theaters of war to Trump than he inherited from Bush, with his airstrikes, military raids, and drone warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan.
What an international embarrassment that Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2009.
Do I sound bitter? I'm actually sad. Even if I allow for the reality of just wars, I hate war. I hate the way it kills people and other living things, poisons the environment, orphans innocent children, destroys irreplaceable cultural artifacts and lifeways, and scars all participants, if not physically, then certainly emotionally and psychologically. I hate the residue and imprint it leaves, often for generations. I hate its long-lived consequences, which so seldom seem to be accounted for.
Consider this example: the cluster bombs dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War. Laos wasn't even involved in the war, but the U.S. dropped cluster bombs there to destroy North Vietnamese supply routes. One third of those bombs did not explode upon impact, and they continue to kill and maim people today, fifty years after they were first dropped.
Consider also the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that combatants and civilian victims live with, often for the rest of their lives.
My point: I do not support spending more and more on the military. I do not support our current rate of military spending, and I would like to see some portion go to setting right some of what's been destroyed by our past and current war efforts. For example, can we commit to sending experts in munitions detection and deactivation to locate and remove all the unexploded cluster bombs in Laos? Don't we owe that to the Laotians? Can we develop multiple, easily accessible PTSD treatments for veterans? Can we throw some money, big money, at helping people and places to heal?
I've been thinking about this for years. Decades ago, I looked into what it meant to withhold all or part of the income tax I owed. The idea was, in some small but real way, to starve the military budget, as such a large percentage of our tax dollars goes to defense. War tax resistance is a thing, and it has been for a long time. I learned about people who had done it for years. I also learned that, every once in a while, in order to show its might, the IRS identifies certain war tax resisters and jails them, or seizes money from their salaries or bank accounts.
Even though the likelihood of being jailed was very small, I did not want to risk it, so I shied away from war tax resistance.
BUT. What do you think about this alternative?:
*Filling out income tax forms is already a complicated nightmare. Who cares if we add one more, sort of fun, democratic layer, veneered right on top of your teetering stack of IRS forms and schedules?
*What if, in an effort to make our democracy more democratic, we created a system where individuals, when they pay income tax, dedicate where they would like to see their tax monies go?
*We would need to agree on a basic necessary operating budget for everything we currently fund—health and human services; agriculture; environmental protection; social security; education; defense; HUD; Army Corps of Engineers, et cetera and so forth. Each of those entities would be guaranteed that minimum working budget, funded by all of us, via proportionally deducting it from each person's taxes.
*We would also need to decide on a menu of possibilities for further, additional funding. We'd need to figure out how specific we would get, e.g., would public education be a single category that included everything relevant, or we would we break it up into public pre-K, K-12, and community colleges? You get the idea.
*Now comes the fun part: After that basic essential funding was deducted from our taxes, we would get to browse the menu and decide where any remaining taxes we owed would go. Would you like to see more money go to the parks system? You got it, baby! Or to food and nutrition programs? Check! Or to a beefed-up environmental protection agency that actually protects the environment? You could choose that! Or, you might decide to divide the portion of your income tax that you get to allot between all three of those options.
I do not mean to gloss over the many practical concerns and considerations such a proposal raises. I only mean to write a blog post and share a seed of an idea.
Some people will want to fund the military at its current rate. Okay then. As long as those of us who don't want to do so aren't forced into it, year after bellicose year.
For those who do not want to exercise this choice at all, there could be a default setting where the IRS would divvy up equally and dispassionately whatever was available for divvying; i.e., they could do it for you if you didn't want to do that extra bit of thinking and feeling.
If we got to do this, I wonder in what ways, if any, the budget would look different? I wonder if most Americans would like it if all Americans lived the healthiest possible lives in humane and green conditions, with all needs met? A system like this would provide a much clearer picture of people's priorities than the wacky quadrennial clown parade we call presidential elections.
Edwin Starr’s “War”: