War on Terror: Expenditures - YourNetwork.tv

Welcome to YOURTRUTH. As you probably already know, U.S. forces have been occupying Iraq for the past six years. But did you know your tax dollars recently financed a $700 million dollar American embassy in Iraq the size of 80 football fields and bigger than the Vatican? It has its own shopping mall, schools, restaurants, a cinema, and water treatment facility. Did you know it will cost U.S. taxpayers a billion dollars a year to operate? How can we afford to fund this embassy along with our 75 other military bases in Iraq?

There is no such thing as a cheap war. Wars require transport, weapons, gasoline, oil, water, food…the list goes on and on. The costs of war are borne by governments, who are funded by taxpayers. In essence, the taxpayer is the main financier of most military operations. As we face the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, with state and local budgets strapped for cash and thousands of people losing their jobs and homes, shouldn't we be using this money to help American citizens?

How much are we spending on the war on terror? Thus far, Congress has allocated more than $870 billion for the wars in the Middle East, according to the National Priorities Project. We are now spending over $12 billion a month in this region for combat operations! According to the Center for Defense Information, 51% of your federal income taxes go specifically to military spending! Not healthcare or education, but WAR! Another shocking fact is that 15% of your federal income taxes go to paying the interest on that national debt created by military spending, according to warresisters.org!

One of the reasons we need to be concerned about war spending is that our country is already racked with debt. Since 2001, our National Debt has doubled from 5 trillion to 11 trillion dollars. Did you know that every American alive owns a $33,000 portion of the National Debt? That's enough money to buy a 1 series BMW! And get this: $9,000 of the $33,000 is owed to different countries like China and Japan! Can we count on a prosperous future with this much debt hanging over our heads, especially when we owe so much to other countries? Our politicians continue to tell us that we need to spend money to keep America safe. And it's true that we haven't been attacked since 9/11; however, dropping vast amounts of cash in the Middle East while doing little to enhance America's image abroad could make protecting our country costlier and more difficult in the long run.

You might be thinking, I don't care how much we have to spend as long as our country is safe. And we haven't been attacked since 9/11, right? But did you know that you are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack? More significantly, you're 17,000 times more likely to die from heart disease than terrorism! Heart disease is the leading killer in America, responsible for the deaths of about 900,000 people a year according to the American Heart Association. This annual death toll is the equivalent of 300 9/11 attacks! So you would think that we're spending countless trillions for a war on heart disease, but this is not so. The base budget for the Department of Health and Human Services has never exceeded $80 billion. Compare this with the 2010 fiscal year budget for the DOD of $533 billion. Why the enormous disparity in spending if heart disease is so much deadlier?

We all know now that the financial costs of these wars have been astronomical. But what about the human costs? The British polling group Opinion Research Business has found that more than 35,000 Afghanis have died and almost 2,000,000 refugees have fled the country. 5,000 American soldiers have died and more than 31,000 wounded. One million-plus Iraqi citizens have died as a result of our occupation and over 4 million have been displaced. According to an Oxfam study, Iraqi citizens face an enormous humanitarian crisis. 43% live on less than a dollar a day. The UN also reports that 1/3 of Iraqis don't have access to clean drinking water and Baghdad residents only have 1-2 hours of electricity per day. Though they have been freed from Saddam Hussein's rule, Iraqi citizens endure a substandard quality of life and many live in squalor. In light of these facts, the official argument that we're saving the Iraqi and Afghani peoples and building a better future for them falls apart.

Americans worried about the economic viability of this war on terror must lobby this administration to change course. So far President Obama is continuing Bush's trend of annually increasing defense spending. The 2010 base budgets for the Department of Defense, the FBI, and Department of Homeland Security will all be the highest in history, a combined $596 billion.

Now is the time to evaluate the consequences of our decisions. The choices we make today impact this generation and all future generations of people at home and abroad. Do we want crippling national debt and endless wars to be the norm for America? Or can we do better? It's up to people like you and me to tell our politicians to stop funding the war and to use this money to help OUR country! Thanks for watching, don't forget to tune in next week as we investigate further into who shapes our foreign policy. You may be surprised to learn that it is not just the President and Congress.