{"id":33154,"date":"2018-04-06T05:41:09","date_gmt":"2018-04-06T10:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33154"},"modified":"2018-04-06T05:41:41","modified_gmt":"2018-04-06T10:41:41","slug":"war-deaths-and-taxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=33154","title":{"rendered":"War Deaths, and Taxes"},"content":{"rendered":"

War Deaths, and Taxes<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Are the federal taxes coming out of your wages and due this week killing you? Sadly what\u2019s rhetorical for US tax payers is gravely literal for people of eight countries currently on the shooting end of the US budget.<\/p>\n

This year at least 47% of federal income taxes goes to the military (27%, or $857 billion, for today\u2019s bombings and occupations, weapons, procurement, personnel, retiree pay & healthcare, Energy Dept. nuclear weapons, Homeland Security, etc.); and 20%, or $644 billion, for past military bills (veterans\u2019 benefits \u2014 $197 billion; and 80% of the interest on the national debt \u2014 $447 billion).<\/p>\n

A ceasefire, drawdown and retreat from the country\u2019s unwinnable wars would reduce this tax burden, and didn\u2019t the president promise to end the foreign \u201cnation-building\u201d that\u2019s breaking the bank? Of course, that was a Trump promise, so:<\/p>\n

Seven US airmen were killed on March 15 when a US Pave Hawk helicopter crashed in western Iraq, with 5,200 soldiers and as many contract mercenaries fighting there.<\/p>\n

When VP Mike Pence visited Afghanistan last December he said with perfect meaninglessness: \u201cwe are here to see this through.\u201d About 11,000 US soldiers are currently seeing it, and the Pentagon will be sending thousands more this spring. US bombing runs have almost tripled since the Obama\/Trump handover, and Pence claimed \u201cwe\u2019ve put the Taliban on the defensive\u201d \u2014 but during Pentagon chief Jim Mattis\u2019s visit the Taliban shot dozens of rockets at the Kabul airport where the general\u2019s plane was parked.<\/p>\n

The 16-year-old war in Afghanistan is now broadly understood to be militarily unwinnable, so a ceasefire and withdrawal would be a quick way to save billions of tax dollars. But US B-52s bombers flying from Minot Air Base in North Dakota are still creating new terrorists every day; the 3,900 US bombs and missiles exploded on the country in 2017 caused countless of civilian casualties.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

War Deaths, and Taxes Are the federal taxes coming out of your wages and due this week killing you? Sadly what\u2019s rhetorical for US tax payers is gravely literal for people of eight countries currently on the shooting end of the US budget. This year at least 47% of federal income taxes goes to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[5493,12087,783,827,844,862],"class_list":["post-33154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-counterpunch","tag-john-laforge","tag-taxes","tag-united-states","tag-us-military","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33154"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33157,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33154\/revisions\/33157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}