Labor of Love?

Let's say you are a professional in the US. You love your job, make $100K, and pay $25K in taxes each year. Do you know how your taxes are spent? The US government summarizes this in a pie-chart in the 1040 tax instruction booklet each year (see left). The major slices include military spending (21%), Social Security (21%), Medicare (12%), health spending (10%), interest payments on the nine trillion dollars national debt (9%), etc.

These numbers have long been challenged by many watchdog and pacifist groups. They claim that interest payments for national debt hide the contribution to that debt from past military spending, that a chunk of the health and welfare slice is spent on war veterans, that the official budget is supplemented by "one-off" war spending bills, etc. One such group is the War Resisters League (WRL) which holds "war to be a crime against humanity ... founded in 1923, [it] advocates Gandhian nonviolence as the method for creating a democratic society free of war, racism, sexism, and human exploitation."

If the accounting is made honest, claims the WRL (read their analysis), the numbers turn out to be 51% for military-oriented spending, 49% for the rest. And with a 52% share of the global arms trade (2006 data), the big, blind economic forces in the US seem aligned to sustain not only the military-industrial complex that employs so many but also the arms trading industry (largely on the back of sales to emerging third world nations). I've wondered more than once: How do liberals reconcile buying retirement mutual funds that invest in missile/fighter jet makers with their apparent yearning for peace in the world? 

And if the WRL is right, you, as the professional above, fork over $12,500 each year to US military-oriented spending (a chunk of it currently for the Iraq war) and you labor 1-1/2 months each year to pay for it. Whatever your profession, it sure ain't no labor of love.

Comments

[Ruchira]

Does the military expenditure also count the "aid" we give to other countries to fight and torture on our behalf?

[Namit]

Military aid (and deep discounting) are not included in the global trade figures in the Congressional Research Service report (only actual arms sales are counted). My guess is that the WRL would have included all such "aid" in the 51% slice of the budget spending pie.

[Namit]

It's pretty uncanny that a http://www.latimes.com/la-na-warcost14nov14,0,2237064.story?coll=la-home-center>new report released today covers the same ground and estimates that:

The total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could balloon to $3.5 trillion over the next decade because of such "hidden" costs as oil market disruptions, foregone investments, long-term health care for veterans and interest payments on borrowed war funding, according to a report released by congressional Democrats on Tuesday.

The projection, by the Democratic majority on the Joint Economic Committee, is more than $1 trillion higher than a recent forecast by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which accounted only for direct spending and interest payments and assumed a moderate withdrawal of troops between now and 2017.

So the cost of war for a family of four works out to be $42K. By the way, the total cost of war of $3.5 trillion is about 5 times the annual GNP of India, i.e., five times the combined annual income of all Indians. Alternately, it is about 80% of what all humans on earth earn in a year.