Thoughts While Filing My Income Tax Return
by Mary Shepard, WAMM
Did anyone ask me if I wanted to subsidize Lockheed Martin's marketing of F16 Fighter planes to prospective new members of NATO? What for? As taxpayers, we pay for the marketing and the training. We send the purchase money to the buyer. The company gets the profits. Arms sales, contrary to what we are told, are not moneymakers but money-losers for us taxpayers.
Who in Minnesota wants to spend $831,587,980 of our tax money on a missile defense system that doesn't work? When and where do we get a chance to vent our outrage?
Why do we continue to send $3 billion to Israel (a nation that can afford free education and free health care to its citizens) while we are told there is not enough money to renovate our schools and raise teachers' salaries, much less ensure medical care for our children?
Whatever happened to the debate on the arms race? The whole subject was dropped around 1994 and was hardly mentioned in our last election.
Whenever the proposed cuts in the budget are mentioned, which now seems to be daily, all politicians supporting such cuts should be challenged to justify them in the light of some absurd expense in the military budget. There are plenty to choose from.
Minnesota has been fortunate, so far, in not getting as deeply hooked as most states on the Pentagon's passion for doling out defense contracts. These contracts are spread out liberally, cultivating a widespread economic dependency on the perpetual creation of markets for weapons. This could be crudely translated into an economic dependency on the generation of future wars.
With this new administration, so tightly connected to defense contractors, it may be that Minnesota will be considered too ripe a plum not to be plucked. Our newest senator quickly ascended to the Senate's Armed Services Committee, which parcels out the tempting contracts. This bears watching!
Our politicians are urging our schools to quantify, by some across-the-board measurements, the success or failure of each school in educating our children. This is not easy. How do you quantify creativity, imagination, empathy, or values? Yet these politicians feel they must deal in numbers to hold the teachers accountable.
I wish they would worry as much about keeping the Pentagon accountable. How many wars have our B2 bombers prevented? How many of our occupations of other nations have helped those nations achieve democracy? How many of the countries we have bombed are better off than before we intervened?