Yes, this is a long post. If you'd like to learn something of why the Flat Tax (though something I support) is not a panacea for our problems, bear with me.
Just think, for a moment, about how long a second is. Now consider that a billion seconds makes up about half of your expected lifetime. Consider that, a billion days ago, our earliest hominid ancestors still hadn't begun to walk on two feet. 1 billion is an impossibly immense number.
Knowing that, realize what is truly meant when you see that the government is spending roughly 1,500 Billions of dollars on the military in one year. If dollars were seconds again, that would be 750 modern lifespans. Thats enough for you to have lived since long before recorded history began. If you had 1,500 billion seconds to live, you could have personally taken part in the building of Mesopotamia, and still be living today, with tens of thousands more years of life to look forward to.
1,500 billion dollars in a year... and what did it buy?
Consider the following figures. 50 of those military billions fund an agency which today spies on, interrogates, and imprisons American citizens without a trial, in direct violation of everything that is legal and constitutional... the Department of Homeland Security. Consider, too, that 100 of those Billions were spent just to pay off roughly half the yearly interest on our past war debts- not paying back the debt at all, mind you, but paying off part of the interest our debts build every year. That's so it only increases about half as fast as it would if we didn't pay it at all... and yes, in case you were wondering, that is war debt which was somehow not covered by the billions we have already been spending on war. Most of the rest, some 700 billion or so, is spent on all our military operations across the globe, which of course covers military assets, such as the gear, training, and supplies used by our soldiers. These assets go on to kill foriegn leadership we dislike (for instance, Hussein and Bin-Laden), to train and supply rebels to overthrow those we can't easily touch, and to build and garrison bases on foriegn soil, to remind them of the ever-present threat of military action if they "get out of line". We have been, and continue to use military forces to mold the world and its cultures into forms that better suit us. Can you imagine how it would be if a foriegn country built a military base in your hometown? Is it as shocking to you as it is to me, when you consider the place of American in the world stage in that light?
The ethical concerns of this aside, all these things are done in the name of our best interests, despite that it continues to bankrupt us at home, and consume the majority of our Government's funding. We can see where this cost has gotten us as well, just looking at these past 10 years... our neighbors in the Middle-East are still divided by civil wars, the corpses of their people and our own continue to pile up daily, its infrastructure remains in tatters, and the price of imported goods from the region (such as oil) are on the rise. Ignoring the cost in human life, how's that for the payoff on a $1,500 billion a year investment? Actually, it looks like we lost there too.
And yet, we keep doing this year after year, without change. What we do instead is propose cuts to our funding elsewhere... 5 billion from the National Science Foundation, 10 from the Department of Education, and so on. They've cut NASA's funding down to a meager 3 billion dollars, which is supposed to cover the launching and maintaining our global satellite network, as well as all of NASA's technological research and development. At this point, their funding was cut so far that they had to look to citizens for donations, just to get their latest probe to Mars. And when the organizations they propose cutting from have total budgets like 10 or 15 billion dollars, cutting the programs entirely wouldn't even put a drop in the bucket of the $1,500 we devote to military spending.
So, to bring this all back to the discussion at hand. Even if we taxed all Americans equally at a flat 10%, rather than allowing tax breaks for those with the most wealth, that would still only be equal to about 1.5 trillion dollars, which would barely be able to cover our military spending alone. For comparison, however, a 10% Flat Tax would cover every non-military bit of our federal budget 3 times over. The flat tax is a good idea, and one I support as a method to prevent more and more wealth from being bled out of economic circulation, and into the hoards of the impossibly wealthy. However, we need to consider our behavior as a nation, and changing it as a solution. Sadly, every politician is bound to a sort of popularity contest, due to the nature of popular elections, and thus fears cutting military spending lest they be accused of "making us look weak" on the national stage. So, as a result, they continue to run the economy into the ground, and raise the debt ceiling to postpone dealing with the crisis, making us look shortsighted, powermongering incompetents to the rest of the world instead... and ignoring the debt crisis and its obvious solution is like plugging your ears and singing as the building crumbles down on top of you.
Note that after gathering revenue, the Federal Government doesn't have a surplus left over anymore, which feeds our growth... we have a defecit, an ever-growing debt which we ignore as though it's completely unrelated to our financial problems. Is this not somehow insane?
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Anyway, this is reminding me of why I can't look at our national budget figures. It upsets me. In fact, I think if the average person stopped and really looked at what was going on, they'd be up in arms.
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Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread (Read 1285814 times)