This is a brutal read. I couldn't come up with a single snippet that did justice to this article, you just have to read it all. In a nutshell, it gives a brief but devastating relationship between our federal taxes and spending cuts and the resulting grief and destruction.
Blood, Debt and Taxes
The Real Death Tax
By STAN COX
Now that the rush to file our income tax returns has come and gone for another year, it's only natural to wonder what all that money's paying for.
These days, the money we're sending to Washington is buying a lot more war and a lot less economic security. In the current White House budget request, Pentagon spending would rocket upward, with a $29 billion increase. If you include military portions of the budgets of Homeland Security, Energy, and other departments, US taxpayers would fork over $563 billion for military spending in the coming fiscal year.
But wait! (as they say on infomercials) There's more! That $563 billion doesn't even include the cost of the war in Iraq! President Bush has submitted a supplemental budget request for $74 billion, of which $61 billion will fund that continuing military occupation.
The Iraq war has cost $273 billion so far. But to account for the total cost of the war, according to Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, we should project the future costs of fighting and withdrawal, added veterans' costs, the cost of lifetime care for brain-injured troops, the added interest on the national debt, and other expenses.
(...)
An estimated 6000 US troops have suffered serious physical brain injuries so far. Psychological trauma is even more widespread. Of the 500,000-plus men and women who have served in Iraq to date, the Pentagon estimates that 175,000 have required psychological treatment.
(...)
http://www.counterpunch.org/cox04142006.html
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