How much did you pay for War Tax this year?
Tomorrow is income tax day, the annual ritual when hundreds of thousands of Americans (especially procrastinators like myself) show up at post offices with precious documents in hand, seeking to find stamps and avoid late penalty fees.
Given President Obama’s speech yesterday regarding addressing the federal debt — which referred to the massive cost of our nation’s involvement in multiple wars, but then practically ignored a fiscal solution (ending our participation in those wars, as David Swanson writes) — this begs a question: how much of your own money is being spent on militarism?
Our friends at Rethink Afghanistan have put together a War Tax Calculator (based on the National Priorities Project’s math) that lets users input your income and tax filing status and see how much you have spent on war via your taxes. Then, you receive an “IOU” that you can send to your Member of Congress. This is a timely resource, since today, a bipartisan group of congresspeople will gather in Washington, D.C., for a press conference to address this issue.
The NPP math is more lenient than that which our friends at the War Resisters League use. Each year, WRL prepares a simple yet powerful pie chart document that offers a stark and coherent analysis of how much money is being spent from each federal tax dollar toward military-related purposes. When my spouse and I decided a few years ago to withhold more than 50% of the money we owed the federal government as a protest against several of its militaristic foreign policy decisions, we based our calculation of withholdings using WRL’s excellent resource.
I encourage all FOR supporters to review both the NPP and WRL figures, in order to get a clear picture of how our own money is being used to fund our military participation in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan (not to mention Colombia, Libya, etc.).
