Hoping for a tax refund

The White House has a neat little computer tool you can use to see where your tax dollars go. You plug in how much you are paying in federal income tax and you get a “receipt” showing what those taxes bought.

I used it and my “receipt” said that 26.3% of my taxes went to maintain our military. By comparison, the receipt said we spent 2.1% on defending the environment. 1.2% went for scientific research. 4.8% was spent on education and job training.

We are in the midst of intense national, state and local debates over budgets, taxes and priorities. Republicans want to cut social programs, regulatory agencies, kill Medicare through a poorly designed privatization scheme and lower taxes on the uber-rich from 35% maximum to 25% maximum.

Democrats oppose this GOP initiative by proposing to screw average working families, the elderly and the poor slightly less.

The Tea Party just wants to blow everything up and return us to a society as it was in 1776.

We can’t afford roads and bridges, schools and school teachers. We can’t afford medical research, food safety or disease prevention. We can’t afford police officers or enough air traffic controllers to keep our skies safe. We can not afford to feed the hungry.

But we can afford to spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined.

A recent New London Day story on General Dynamics Electric Boat caught my eye. The Navy is thinking that it wants a new “stretch” version of Virginia-class attack sub, adding four more missile tubes to its armament. New Virginia-class subs would be configured with the added tubes.

Older subs could be retro-fitted – chopped in half and “stretched” with the new missile tubes – at the cost of only $500 million a piece! 

Our local economy relies heavily on Electric Boat jobs in Groton and Quonset and the steady union wages and benefits they provide. Electric Boat is one of the biggest government jobs programs in southern New England. However, its principle purpose is to keep people employed, not to build things that we actually need.

We have more submarines than the rest of the world combined given us near total worldwide naval supremacy even though we face very few actual naval threats, unless you count five Somali pirates in a tiny boat.

Today, ship-building in done by mega-contractors like General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. The old government owned shipyards are long gone, relics of the World War II days. Much of the Navy’s budget is geared to building new ships we don’t need to keep those private shipyards from closing.

So we have a submarine (and aircraft carrier) building program that has little relationship to actual threats, but everything to do with keeping shipyard workers working. Now, when it comes to Electric Boat, I’m happy those workers are working.

I just wish they were building things that actually created value for our country. We need new renewable energy sources and our waters offer tremendous opportunities to generate energy from tides and currents, and of course, the wind. We need more research and design work, and a whole lot of fabrication that a skilled workforce like EB’s would be great at doing.  

Then there are cruise ships. The United States hasn’t built cruise ships since the 1950s. None of our shipyards are geared to build them and the skills involved have been lost. I for one would like to see Electric Boat build useful things, like for instance, electric boats.

We have spent ten years, half a trillion dollars and thousands of civilian and military dead in Afghanistan fighting an enemy that does not have an army, navy or air force. I want my money back.