Lyndon Johnson, cautioned that his assist of the Civil Rights Act was too daring and politically dangerous, famously responded: “What else is the presidency for?”
America of America is without doubt one of the richest, if not the richest, nation-states within the historical past of the world. It is also probably the most unequal. So its folks dwell in distress and squalor. What else is a rustic’s spectacular wealth for, aside from to offer a excessive way of life for its residents?
A leftist financial program ought to start with the federal government’s price range. How ought to revenues be collected, and from whom? How ought to the cash be spent? The Left should articulate a holistic method to the federal price range.
In keeping with the U.S. Treasury’s web site: “The federal authorities collects income from quite a lot of sources, together with particular person revenue taxes, payroll taxes, company revenue taxes, and excise taxes. It additionally collects income from companies like admission to nationwide parks and customs duties.” This got here to $4.44 trillion in 2023. The largest supply of this money bonanza was revenue taxes.
As well as, states and cities took in about $2 trillion.
$6 trillion is, to state probably the most clearly apparent factor on the earth, a staggering, monumental sum of money. But we hardly ever take a beat to absorb that truth.
A part of the reason being that it doesn’t really feel like we dwell in a wealthy nation with an enormous quantity of taxes coming into its coffers. It positive doesn’t appear like one. Individuals sleep on the streets. Factories are deserted. Faculties are worn. Hospitals are chaotic, understaffed and miserable. Storefronts are boarded up. Litter abounds. Bridges collapse; subways derail; doorways fall off airplanes; high-speed rail and free school and reasonably priced well being care are for different international locations.
Why can’t we’ve good issues? One can blame cycles and methods: late-stage capitalism, the duopoly, the corrupt revolving door between enterprise and the federal government officers who’re supposed to control them. Basically, the reply boils all the way down to dangerous priorities. The folks in cost would reasonably spend our cash on the issues that they care about than what we need and wish: sending weapons to different international locations as a substitute of feeding the poor, tax breaks for companies reasonably than treating younger males hooked on opioids, constructing extra prisons in lieu of hiring social staff.
Reordering a society’s social and financial priorities is a fancy process. To maintain issues comparatively easy, let’s put aside the comparatively lesser and infinitely extra diffuse state and native budgets with a purpose to focus upon the federal price range — spherical it as much as $5 trillion — because the principal engine within the Left’s proposed shift of the U.S. to a rustic that places folks first. Additional to the objective of simplification, let’s assume that general revenues stay flat in actual phrases adjusted for inflation — no tax cuts or hikes, no important modifications in tariffs like a commerce struggle.
The latest U.S. navy price range, for 2024, is available in at $886 billion — by far the most important expense, and better than all different federal spending mixed. And that’s radically understating the true value of militarism. Because the socialist journal Month-to-month Evaluate calculates, once you embrace prices related to medical and different bills associated to veterans, debt service on deficit spending for outdated wars and navy help to overseas international locations, the true quantity doubles. So the precise 2024 complete is nearer to $1.6 trillion.
We’re recognizing that nothing makes us much less protected than a ahead, aggressive navy posture by which U.S. forces and proxies are stationed across the globe. They’re sitting geese and provocateurs. A Left worthy of its identify favors a navy equipment able to defending the U.S. — nothing extra, nothing much less. We’d like missile defenses, border protections, a naval drive to guard our coasts, the type of domestically centered armed forces that would have successfully responded to the 9/11 assaults. Given our exceptionally safe geographical scenario, surrounded by two huge oceans and instantly bordered solely by two nations, each shut allies, we are able to get protection — the true factor, not the hegemony we purchase with the Division of Protection — on a budget.
Chalmers Johnson, the tutorial and nice critic of the American empire, known as the Pentagon to ask for an inventory of its abroad bases; not solely might they not produce such an inventory, they may solely estimate the quantity. (It’s 800, roughly.) Not understanding what number of bases you might have is a significant signal of overextension. So is the response, when studying that certainly one of your nation’s troopers has been killed in fight, of shock that we have been in that nation within the first place. We should always shut each final one and convey each final soldier and sailor residence.
Brazil, a regional superpower that’s larger than the contiguous 48 states, has a navy price range of $20 billion. That’s a rounding error, 0.25% of ours. In fact, Brazil doesn’t wage wars or plant bases on the other facet of the planet — and neither ought to we. We will spend that 99.75% of that $1.6 trillion on stuff that helps reasonably than kills.
Subsequent week, a have a look at different federal price range bills the Left ought to slash so we are able to redirect these valuable funds to addressing our needs and wishes.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
