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Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Trade Offs
A website called the National Priorities Project Database provides some excellent talking points for letters to the editor, conversations with friends and family or for your own knowledge. You can enter your state and get its tradeoffs in terms of what certain federal budget expenditures would provide if allocated to our human needs instead of war and weapons.
For instance,
| Taxpayers in New Mexico will pay $58.9 million for nuclear weapons in FY2006. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided: | |
| 14,186 People Receiving Health Care or | |
| 8,604 Head Start Places for Children or | |
| 38,319 Children Receiving Health Care or | |
| 616 Affordable Housing Units or | |
| 9 New Elementary Schools or | |
| 17,468 Scholarships for University Students or | |
| 1,019 Music and Arts Teachers or | |
| 1,587 Public Safety Officers or | |
| 11,783 Homes with Renewable Electricity or | |
| 1,163 Port Container Inspectors |
If you register at the site, you can get a variety of data reports for any state about such things as health care, energy use, demographics, poverty and much more. Well worth a visit.
February 8, 2005 at 08:44 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
Before anyone makes a fool of themselves writing a letter to the editor, they might consider that New Mexicans actually don't pay anything in federal taxes. We are on the state version of the Earned Income Tax Credit.
Take a visit to the Tax Foundation, and you'll discover we get a $1.99 back for every dollar we pay in taxes.
Posted by: Mario Burgos | Feb 8, 2005 10:27:09 PM
Of course we know that most Red States receive more in federal spending than what they pay in taxes. It's the Blue States that subsidize the Red by their paying more than they get back. Funny how that happens. Liberal states funding conservative states.
I always find it hilarious when people like Sen. Domenici trumpet their allegiance to cutting federal spending and making the federal government smaller, while on the other hand they brag about how much pork they commandeer for their own states. You might say it's a moral failing. Or just greed and hypocrisy.
But the point of this post was to illustrate what kinds of effective and productive spending are lost because of rampant overspending without any degree of fiscal responsibility for out of control programs like nukes.
Posted by: barb | Feb 9, 2005 8:23:58 AM
