SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
On Tax Day, there's more than one elephant in the room, and they're all in mansions.
Elephants occupy the bulging mansions of 657 American billionaires, 43 of them new this past pandemic year. Their combined wealth soared to $4.2 trillion--up $1.3 trillion--between March 21, 2020 and February 6, 2021. Nor do these billionaires pay taxes on the new wealth unless they sell these assets at a profit. During this same period, more than 78 million working people lost their jobs.
Our politicians never consult the public about what makes us feel secure in order to give us a voice defining national security.
Someone has spotted these elephants in their mansions: Senator Elizabeth Warren and colleagues in the House have proposed the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. Millionaires would pay 2 cents on every dollar of wealth above $50 million and billionaires, 3 cents on every dollar of wealth above a $1 billion. Would they even feel it? Couldn't these mega-rich afford more like a nickel and 10 cents tax on a dollar respectively, given that most of the 2017 Trump-Republican tax cuts accrue to them?
But the biggest Tax Day elephant in the room resides in the 5-sided military mansion, the Pentagon, with its criminally large budget--nearly a trillion dollars each year siphoned from our tax dollars. Why criminal? Consider these five facts:
Has our government learned nothing as it continues to use the lion's share of our tax dollars to ensure global military supremacy while neglecting our security and well being at home?
The chief pandemic profiteer Lockheed Martin received an estimated $450 million to keep its supply chain for weapons funded. So generous was the advance funding that the company advertised thousands of new jobs during the pandemic. Major weapons contractors Raytheon and Northrop Grumman reported being satisfied in meeting their customers' needs throughout the pandemic.
Let's take a look at what our tax money went to this past year.
57 cents of each dollar we paid in our discretionary taxes went to support the military, our wars, weapons, and bases, including 800 military bases abroad and military operations in an estimated 150 countries.
A few pennies of each discretionary tax dollar went to support each of these essential human security needs: environmental protection, education, housing, public health, food and agriculture, research on renewable energy, road and bridges, public lands and parks, diplomacy, and more.
No wonder military readiness stayed intact during year 1 of Covid while most other sectors of national life suffered.
President Eisenhower captured this tradeoff in privileging weapons over people in his 1953 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense... it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
This timeless wisdom from a man seasoned by World War II was proffered as the Cold War with the Soviet Union was building ominously in the early 1950s. Has our government learned nothing in the ensuing 70 years as it continues to use the lion's share of our tax dollars to ensure global military supremacy while neglecting our security and well being at home?
We know where national priorities lie when the military weapons' contractors were thrown a lifeline and every other sector was doled band aids through whittled down temporary relief acts. This will only shift if the child social security becomes permanent, a living wage of $15 or more is mandated, we invest in an inspired, committed public sector, and we skill up to use and prize diplomacy in contexts of potential conflict.
Political revenge. Mass deportations. Project 2025. Unfathomable corruption. Attacks on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Pardons for insurrectionists. An all-out assault on democracy. Republicans in Congress are scrambling to give Trump broad new powers to strip the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit he doesn’t like by declaring it a “terrorist-supporting organization.” Trump has already begun filing lawsuits against news outlets that criticize him. At Common Dreams, we won’t back down, but we must get ready for whatever Trump and his thugs throw at us. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. By donating today, please help us fight the dangers of a second Trump presidency. |
On Tax Day, there's more than one elephant in the room, and they're all in mansions.
Elephants occupy the bulging mansions of 657 American billionaires, 43 of them new this past pandemic year. Their combined wealth soared to $4.2 trillion--up $1.3 trillion--between March 21, 2020 and February 6, 2021. Nor do these billionaires pay taxes on the new wealth unless they sell these assets at a profit. During this same period, more than 78 million working people lost their jobs.
Our politicians never consult the public about what makes us feel secure in order to give us a voice defining national security.
Someone has spotted these elephants in their mansions: Senator Elizabeth Warren and colleagues in the House have proposed the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. Millionaires would pay 2 cents on every dollar of wealth above $50 million and billionaires, 3 cents on every dollar of wealth above a $1 billion. Would they even feel it? Couldn't these mega-rich afford more like a nickel and 10 cents tax on a dollar respectively, given that most of the 2017 Trump-Republican tax cuts accrue to them?
But the biggest Tax Day elephant in the room resides in the 5-sided military mansion, the Pentagon, with its criminally large budget--nearly a trillion dollars each year siphoned from our tax dollars. Why criminal? Consider these five facts:
Has our government learned nothing as it continues to use the lion's share of our tax dollars to ensure global military supremacy while neglecting our security and well being at home?
The chief pandemic profiteer Lockheed Martin received an estimated $450 million to keep its supply chain for weapons funded. So generous was the advance funding that the company advertised thousands of new jobs during the pandemic. Major weapons contractors Raytheon and Northrop Grumman reported being satisfied in meeting their customers' needs throughout the pandemic.
Let's take a look at what our tax money went to this past year.
57 cents of each dollar we paid in our discretionary taxes went to support the military, our wars, weapons, and bases, including 800 military bases abroad and military operations in an estimated 150 countries.
A few pennies of each discretionary tax dollar went to support each of these essential human security needs: environmental protection, education, housing, public health, food and agriculture, research on renewable energy, road and bridges, public lands and parks, diplomacy, and more.
No wonder military readiness stayed intact during year 1 of Covid while most other sectors of national life suffered.
President Eisenhower captured this tradeoff in privileging weapons over people in his 1953 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense... it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
This timeless wisdom from a man seasoned by World War II was proffered as the Cold War with the Soviet Union was building ominously in the early 1950s. Has our government learned nothing in the ensuing 70 years as it continues to use the lion's share of our tax dollars to ensure global military supremacy while neglecting our security and well being at home?
We know where national priorities lie when the military weapons' contractors were thrown a lifeline and every other sector was doled band aids through whittled down temporary relief acts. This will only shift if the child social security becomes permanent, a living wage of $15 or more is mandated, we invest in an inspired, committed public sector, and we skill up to use and prize diplomacy in contexts of potential conflict.
On Tax Day, there's more than one elephant in the room, and they're all in mansions.
Elephants occupy the bulging mansions of 657 American billionaires, 43 of them new this past pandemic year. Their combined wealth soared to $4.2 trillion--up $1.3 trillion--between March 21, 2020 and February 6, 2021. Nor do these billionaires pay taxes on the new wealth unless they sell these assets at a profit. During this same period, more than 78 million working people lost their jobs.
Our politicians never consult the public about what makes us feel secure in order to give us a voice defining national security.
Someone has spotted these elephants in their mansions: Senator Elizabeth Warren and colleagues in the House have proposed the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. Millionaires would pay 2 cents on every dollar of wealth above $50 million and billionaires, 3 cents on every dollar of wealth above a $1 billion. Would they even feel it? Couldn't these mega-rich afford more like a nickel and 10 cents tax on a dollar respectively, given that most of the 2017 Trump-Republican tax cuts accrue to them?
But the biggest Tax Day elephant in the room resides in the 5-sided military mansion, the Pentagon, with its criminally large budget--nearly a trillion dollars each year siphoned from our tax dollars. Why criminal? Consider these five facts:
Has our government learned nothing as it continues to use the lion's share of our tax dollars to ensure global military supremacy while neglecting our security and well being at home?
The chief pandemic profiteer Lockheed Martin received an estimated $450 million to keep its supply chain for weapons funded. So generous was the advance funding that the company advertised thousands of new jobs during the pandemic. Major weapons contractors Raytheon and Northrop Grumman reported being satisfied in meeting their customers' needs throughout the pandemic.
Let's take a look at what our tax money went to this past year.
57 cents of each dollar we paid in our discretionary taxes went to support the military, our wars, weapons, and bases, including 800 military bases abroad and military operations in an estimated 150 countries.
A few pennies of each discretionary tax dollar went to support each of these essential human security needs: environmental protection, education, housing, public health, food and agriculture, research on renewable energy, road and bridges, public lands and parks, diplomacy, and more.
No wonder military readiness stayed intact during year 1 of Covid while most other sectors of national life suffered.
President Eisenhower captured this tradeoff in privileging weapons over people in his 1953 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense... it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
This timeless wisdom from a man seasoned by World War II was proffered as the Cold War with the Soviet Union was building ominously in the early 1950s. Has our government learned nothing in the ensuing 70 years as it continues to use the lion's share of our tax dollars to ensure global military supremacy while neglecting our security and well being at home?
We know where national priorities lie when the military weapons' contractors were thrown a lifeline and every other sector was doled band aids through whittled down temporary relief acts. This will only shift if the child social security becomes permanent, a living wage of $15 or more is mandated, we invest in an inspired, committed public sector, and we skill up to use and prize diplomacy in contexts of potential conflict.