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Editor’s note: Would it make more sense to save all the symbolic gestures and bring our troops home, stop the runaway pentagon spending (The United States spends more than the next 45 highest spending countries in the world combined), and use that to reinvest in this country’s infrastructure that in turn will begin to create more jobs. Use our hard earned money to feed and shelter the poor. Maybe build instead of destroy.
Boston Globe: According to World Bank estimates, $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth.
At the upper range of those estimates, the $456 billion cost of the war could have fed and educated the world’s poor for five and a half years.
~AFP
Influential US lawmakers on Thursday called for levying a new income tax to pay for the war in Afghanistan, warning its costs pose a mortal threat to efforts like a sweeping health care overhaul.
“Regardless of whether one favors the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for,” the lawmakers, all prominent Democratic allies of Obama, said in a joint statement on the “Share The Sacrifice Act of 2010.”
The proposal came with US President Barack Obama set to announce within weeks his decision on whether to send more US troops to fight the war, now in its ninth year.
The group included House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey; Representative John Murtha, who chair that panel’s defense subcommittee; and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank.
The proposal, a heavily symbolic measure seen as having next to no chance of becoming law, would impose a war surtax on income beginning in 2011 — though it would allow the president to delay implementation by one year upon deciding the US economy is too weak to sustain such a tax shift.
It would also exempt members of the US military who have served in combat since the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes, their families, and families of soldiers who died as a result of combat.
“The only people who?ve paid any price for our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan are our military families,” the lawmakers said. “We believe that if this war is to be fought, it?s only fair that everyone share the burden.”
If the war is not paid for, its costs “will devour money that could be used to rebuild our economy by fixing our broken health care system, expanding educational opportunities and job training possibilities, attacking our long term energy problems and building stronger communities,” they said.
