“Balancing the Budget” is a stated concern, if not the mantra, of the House Republicans. Given our profligate spending, they say, we need to tighten belts, impose fiscal discipline and cut waste. No more free rides for the welfare queens or the undocumented. And while we’re at it, let’s rein in entitlements too. We all have to make sacrifices if we want to safeguard our children’s children’s futures.
Well, maybe not all Americans have to make those sacrifices equally. While welfare queens are offered as culprits, truly profligate and mind-numbing corporate welfare goes unexamined. Two recent cases of “discretionary spending”? illustrate this ultra-profligacy better than anything.
By the time we stop pumping more money into them in 2022, our wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq will have cost the US between five and six TRILLION dollars. Similarly, the F35 fighter jet program has already cost taxpayers 1.5 TRILLION dollars – for a broken, badly-designed, poorly-managed, some say useless, defense program.
With just 70 million taxpayers in the US, these – not including the rest of the Defense, Homeland Security, or spy agency budgets – have already cost each taxpayer over $108,000. To put it in perspective, that’s 70 million college educations.
The profligacy – rather, the lunacy – doesn’t end there. Yesterday a bipartisan vote of the House of Representatives passed the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act (H.R. 3086), which makes permanent a ban on state and local taxation of Internet access and certain types of internet commerce.
So the same legislators who don’t bat an eye burdening each human taxpayer with an extra $100,000 tax bill won’t even impose reasonable taxes on businesses. I guess it helps that the head of the FCC is a former Comcast lobbyist.
The 2016 election is coming. As usual it promises to be a match between a herd of flag-waving, regime-changing, drone-deploying, pro-corporate Republicans and a gaggle of Democrats who walk and talk exactly like them. As long as both parties continue spending more than half our national treasure on war and empire, ensuring profitable contracts for a handful of companies while allowing infrastructure and tax revenues to decline, nothing will ever change for the better.
It’s time for an alternative to both these corrupt parties.
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