You may have to do a 'free' one time registration to see the article (so dumb!) Anyway, what is not shown in the on-line article are the various graphs that indicate where the tax money goes AFTER the Pentagon takes 58% of our annual budget for discretionary spending. And then the article questions why we spend this un-Godly amount of money on war and not on defense. If it is for defense, who are we defending ourselves against? It's not China; they are our largest trading partner. We will never go to war against China. Terrorists? A RAND Corporation study showed that military force was the least effective means to address terrorism. Politics, at 43%, was the 'best' method. The Pentagon does to the taxpayer what Bernie Maddoff did to his investors...except the Pentagon will never go to jail as they should.
Ben Cohen, of Ben&Jerry fame, uses the article to explain this thievery with a couple of boxes of Oreo's...
"Wallis: Tell me about the Oreo demonstration.
Cohen: That's a demonstration I developed on my own. It makes it easier to understand the federal budget. One Oreo represents $10 billion. The $700 billion Pentagon budget is just a stack of 70 Oreos -- you can understand 70 Oreos. In comparison to that, the federal government spends just four-and-a-half Oreos on education, just one-half an Oreo on alternative energy, and a fraction of an Oreo on Head Start. If you take just seven Oreos off the Pentagon budget, you could provide health care for all the kids who currently don't have it. You could provide Head Start for all the kids who need it. You could eliminate our need for Mideast oil through energy efficiency. You could change our country into one that cares about people, eliminates poverty, and helps people climb their way out, through education."
Cohen: That's a demonstration I developed on my own. It makes it easier to understand the federal budget. One Oreo represents $10 billion. The $700 billion Pentagon budget is just a stack of 70 Oreos -- you can understand 70 Oreos. In comparison to that, the federal government spends just four-and-a-half Oreos on education, just one-half an Oreo on alternative energy, and a fraction of an Oreo on Head Start. If you take just seven Oreos off the Pentagon budget, you could provide health care for all the kids who currently don't have it. You could provide Head Start for all the kids who need it. You could eliminate our need for Mideast oil through energy efficiency. You could change our country into one that cares about people, eliminates poverty, and helps people climb their way out, through education."
If you don't have any Oreo's, any cracker will do if you want to see what this looks like on your kitchen table. And once you've seen that, consider the fact that not one of our elected representatives or the President has seriously considered doing something about this abomination. Consider it? They won't even talk about!
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