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Pentagon and Tax Cheats Already Cost Taxpayers Far More Than Biden’s Job Plan

Pentagon and Tax Cheats Already Cost Taxpayers Far More Than Biden’s Job Plan,   BY Lindsay Koshgarian, Truthout, April 11, 2021  

As President Biden’s $2.3 trillion jobs plan too big? Conservatives are arguing that the package is too expensive and its broad reach is unnecessary.

In order to assess the size and necessity of the bill, it’s important to situate Biden’s jobs plan within a larger federal budget context. Looking at the spending patterns going back decades, the upshot is that the Biden plan is really not all that big, especially given how overdue it is. In fact, progressives have argued that the package, while ambitious in its aims, doesn’t provide enough resources. The plan as proposed is less ambitious than Biden’s campaign proposals, and it already enjoys widespread popularity. There’s plenty of room to make this bill larger, and to make that easier by cutting some of the most egregious uses of federal dollars.

$2.3 trillion sounds like a lot, and it is. But trillions have been spent and are still spent every year in the course of normal government business, on everything from wars and weapons to much-needed but exclusionary social programs like the GI Bill, to tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. To reach the level of spending that is really needed to solve problems like climate change and inequality, it will be necessary to be as bold with this jobs package as the country has been with so many other costly endeavors………

War Spending: $6.4 Trillion

Over the past 20 years, the U.S. has spent $6.4 trillion on wars that have served only to further destabilize the Middle East, cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and enrich military contractors. If that money had been spent on infrastructure and clean energy instead of destructive and deadly wars, the U.S. could have had a fully renewable energy grid by now. The Pentagon is one of the most egregious uses of trillions of dollars.

That $6.4 trillion doesn’t even include the regular, non-war Pentagon budget. President Biden’s $2.3 trillion jobs package works out to about $280 billion a year. The last time the military budget was less than that amount was 1951.

Just a week after announcing his jobs plan, President Biden released a budget proposal that pegged Pentagon spending at $753 billion. That’s more than the $740 billion the Pentagon got this year under President Trump, and it’s more than two and a half times the annual value of the jobs proposal. Every year in recent memory, the Pentagon has accounted for more than half of the discretionary federal budget that Congress allocates each year………..https://truthout.org/articles/pentagon-and-tax-cheats-already-cost-taxpayers-far-more-than-bidens-job-plan/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=bc86a7bb-082f-4047-add9-9379daa553e8

April 12, 2021 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized