Where Have All the Billions Gone?

By Bob Kosuth

The public is justifiably angry about the hundreds and hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars that have gone to bail out the big bankers. Compared to them, honest working people got very little in the way of stimulus dollars to create jobs. Few Americans, however, pay attention to the $700 billion that was recently passed by President Obama and the Congress for current wars and other military spending. More important, this kind of money is being spent every year. That's nearly $2 billion per day and that's a lot of money. Do the math. If your full-time job was to spend $10,000 per day, it would take you 274 years to spend a billion dollars. The military machine does it in a single day, every day.

We often hear that no price is too high to pay for "national defense" but if the US spent this kind of cash to create jobs and improve the livelihood of people at home and abroad, we'd be better off here and we'd have far fewer enemies and lots more friends. Someone might say that a military career is a great opportunity, especially for minorities. Well, I remember when my plane full of draftees took off from Chicago to Fort Polk LA in 1971. It was largely full of inner city Blacks and they were on that plane not because they were particularly patriotic but because like me they had no other options.

Unfortunately, elections don't change much when it comes to military spending and war making. That's something we've learned in the past year. Bush is gone but we still have Bush's wars. The Northland Anti-War Coalition is still around too. Check us out at northlandantiwar.blogspot.com and look at our ad in this issue. Please join us to stop these wars and build a better democracy.

This article above was submitted to the Hillsider newspaper. Be sure to pick up the March issue of the Hillsider to see the NAWC ad inside!