Tax Day and America’s Wars: What the Mayor of One Community Hard Hit by War Spending Is Doing

[marmar]

from TomDispatch:



Tax Day and America’s Wars
What the Mayor of One Community Hard Hit by War Spending Is Doing

By Jo Comerford


Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it. He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital “cost of war” counter, funded entirely by private contributions.

That counter will offer a constantly changing estimate of the total price Binghamton’s taxpayers have been paying for our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since October 2001. By September 30, 2010, the city’s “war tax” will reach $138.6 million -- or even more if, as expected, Congress passes an Obama administration request for supplemental funds to cover the president’s “surge” in Afghanistan. Mayor Ryan wants, he says, to put the counter “where everyone can see it, so that my constituents are urged to have a much-needed conversation.”

In doing so, he’s joining a growing chorus of mayors, including Chicago's Richard Daley and Boston's Thomas Menino, who are ever more insistently drawing attention to what Ryan calls the country’s “skewed national priorities,” especially the local impact of military and war spending. With more than three years left in his current term, Ryan has decided to pull out all the stops to reach his neighbors and constituents, all 47,000 of them, especially the near quarter of the city’s inhabitants who currently live below the poverty line and the 9% who are officially unemployed.

A Hard Hit Rust-Belt City

Like so many post-industrial rust-belt communities, Binghamton was hard hit by the financial meltdown of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, though it faired better than a number of similar cities, in part because Ryan, his administration, and the Binghamton City Council are a smart and scrappy crew. No doubt that’s why he earned the New York State Conference of Mayors Public Administration and Management award two years running. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175231/tomgram%3A_jo_comerford%2C_your_taxes_and_war/#more (the story follows a brief intro)

[xchrom]

1. Recommend

[DrDan]

2. just a tad under $3,000 per person

[raccoon]

3. Rec'd. C'mon, let's get this on Greatest! nt

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Here's another mind-blowing statistic for all of you

The invasion and occupation of Iraq costs about $250 million per day.

In round numbers, that's $10,416,667 per hour or

$173,610 per minute

or $2890 per second

That's not counting the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan or the military bases on every continent on the globe.

Look at the number at the bottom of your 1040 form.

How many seconds of the Irag occupation are this year's income taxes paying for?