Time to pay your war taxes
Once again it’s tax day in the U.S. The rich should be having a nice day—their government in Washington has been highly successful in transferring the tax burden off the rich and onto the rest of us, while passing it off as tax “cuts.” This is hardly ever described as “class warfare,” a term reserved for shifting the tax burden in the opposite direction.
And when you pay your tax bill, you can rest assured that 48% of it is going to pay for war. That figure, and the accompanying pie chart from the War Resisters League, are based on
a line-by-line analysis of detailed tables in the “Analytical Perspectives” book of the Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2006. The percentages are federal funds, which do not include trust funds - such as Social Security - that are raised and spent separately from income taxes. What you pay (or don’t pay) by April 15, 2005, goes to the federal funds portion of the budget. The government practice of combining trust and federal funds began in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, thus making the human needs portion of the budget seem larger and the military portion smaller.