Tax Day and America’s Wars

If you’re an average American taxpayer, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have, since 2001, cost you personally $7,334, according to the “cost of war” counter created by the National Priorities Project (NPP).

They have cost all Americans collectively more than $980,000,000,000. As a country, we’ll pass the trillion dollar mark soon....and we’ll be heading for two trillion-dollar wars.

...If someone you know well hasn’t been wounded or killed in one of them, it can be hard to grasp just how they are also wounding this society. Here’s one way....

What the Mayor of One Community Hard Hit by War Spending Is Doing

By Jo Comerford

Matt Ryan, the mayor of Binghamton, New York, is sick and tired of watching people in local communities “squabble over crumbs,” as he puts it, while so much local money pours into the Pentagon’s coffers and into America’s wars. He’s so sick and tired of it, in fact, that, urged on by local residents, he’s decided to do something about it.

He’s planning to be the first mayor in the United States to decorate the façade of City Hall with a large, digital “cost of war” counter, funded entirely by private contributions.

Click here to read more of this from Tomdispatch.